Nintendo's lawsuit alleging patent infringement in Palworld was unexpected given the timing and subject matter, and nobody was more surprised than developer Pocketpair, who says "no one even considered" patent issues after the game cleared legal checks in Japan pre-release.
Speaking at a Game Developers Conference panel focusing on the hit survival game's explosive launch, post-launch troubles, and community strategy, Pocketpair communications director and publishing manager John 'Bucky' Buckley discussed the hardships the team has faced before and after release. The game was falsely accused of AI-generating creature designs or outright ripping models from Pokemon games, countless threats of violence were sent to the devs, and Nintendo filed a formal lawsuit against the company.
"The last thing that happened that didn't feel very good [...] is a little thing that happened in September," Buckley recalled. "Very tiny even, you probably haven't heard about it. A fellow indie company decided to come for us. 100% transparency here, this is an active lawsuit, so genuinely, I can't talk about it or I'll get wrapped up in the whole thing. But this obviously came as a shock to us. I think it came as a shock to a lot of people because it's alleged patent infringement, which is something that no one even considered, and it's something that we're still hashing out basically."
Asked about the internal response to the lawsuit, Buckley added: "It didn't feel good, obviously. We were pretty vocal before Palworld released that we did legal checks before the game released, and they were all cleared - in Japan. So obviously, when the lawsuit was announced, we were all like, 'What?'
"And we went back to the lawyers, and the lawyers contacted the courts, and they said, 'what's going on,' and that's when we discovered it was patents that they were going for. Pretty much everyone at Pocketpair is a huge fan, so a pretty depressing day, a lot of people kind of head-down walking home in the rain. It changed a lot of things for us. We were just about to release the PlayStation version. We were just about to go to Tokyo Game Show. Obviously, we had to kind of scale back a little bit and hire security guards and stuff like that. But yeah, the short answer is it did not feel good."
Some Palworld updates released in recent months have, directly or indirectly, distanced several of the game's mechanics from ideas discussed in a few of the patents orbiting the lawsuit. Meanwhile, Nintendo has pushed for a US patent, outside the scope of the Japan lawsuit, that sounds a lot like one of the reasons it's suing in the first place.
Palworld dev reckons "very few companies could survive" a launch like theirs: "A lot of companies might crumble under the threats, under the pressure, under the negativity."
