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Nintendo's Palworld lawsuit is now due for a presentation in October ahead of a court opinion in November. IP expert and games veteran Florian Mueller expects the company to struggle to win anything beyond inconsequential damages that would hardly register as a "rounding error." However, the lawsuit has already forced developer Pocketpair to make changes to Palworld, and studio communications lead John Buckley says it's impacted team morale.
Writing on games fray, Mueller reasons that conflict between the patents Nintendo has filed or applied for and the versions of Palworld in question pose insurmountable challenges for the lawsuit. Much of Nintendo's case is based on patents it applied for after Palworld was released, and last year the company amended its claim to target old versions of the hit survival game, those that existed "before Pocketpair made changes to eliminate patent exposure."
As a result, the lawsuit's focus is now limited to a specific window of sales "for which Nintendo can seek damages," per Mueller, and remains tied to Japan. This dramatically narrows the scope of the alleged infringement, leaving the maximum project damages at ¥5 million, or around $31,200 USD by current conversions, assuming the case even makes it that far.
"That is chump change for either party, and just a rounding error compared to Nintendo's litigation expenses," as Mueller puts it.
In December 2024 – and, boy, this suit has gone on for a while, huh – Palworld replaced the ability to summon Pals via Pokeball-esque throwable spheres. Last year, it also changed the gliding mount mechanic, which neighbors a creature-riding patent involved in the suit.
Yet Palworld has soldiered on largely unbothered, with Pocketpair now approaching the game's long-awaited update 1.0 release.
"Given that Nintendo's patent assertions can't impact that release in any meaningful way, the question is whether Nintendo will recognize that patents are not the answer to competition in this space or bring additional lawsuits against Pocketpair," Mueller says.
However, this is complicated by pushback Nintendo's faced in its attempts to secure patents in other regions (the lawsuit is Japan-based, and patents are not global) as well as the established difficulties with pivoting the case to a copyright claim, which Nintendo seemingly investigated and abandoned in late 2023 or early 2024.
"Nintendo has zero chance of prevailing over current Palworld versions," games fray says in a tweet, ruling out any injunction that could upend ongoing work on Pocketpair's game.
However, though the pure financial implications appear minor, the lawsuit has succeeded in pushing Pocketpair to alter Palworld mechanics in an effort to strengthen its case against Nintendo or attempt to avoid future issues. It's important to remember that Nintendo is not suing people for profit. Rather, the company's notorious litigious streak always seems couched in establishing chilling effect precedents that could dissuade other creators from making games, including free fan games or mods, similar to its own.
In this sense, Palworld' years-old design concessions were perhaps the whole point. That, and the unusual show Nintendo made of the lawsuit in the first place (again, perhaps seeking to make its army of lawyers known far and wide).
Speaking with GamesIndustry, Buckley says the lawsuit "impacted morale, for sure."
"Last year, we publicly stated that we had to change two features in the game due to the ongoing litigation," he adds, referring to the aforementioned Palworld mechanic patches. "Unfortunately, it is still very much ongoing. It obviously has an impact on development."
Nevertheless, Buckley says, "We're making the game we like to make, and our players love that. Survival crafting is our genre, and we're going to keep making the game we love."
Last year, Buckley said the lawsuit came as a shock because patent infringement was "something that no one even considered" throughout the rigorous legal checks that Palworld cleared before release.
