Nintendo's lawsuit against Palworld developer Pocketpair is still ongoing and unlikely to be resolved anytime soon, but a new look at the case files suggests a pretty striking stance from the Nintendo legal team: in essence, they're arguing that mods don't count as real games.
In 2021, shortly before the release of Pokemon Legends: Arceus, Nintendo filed a patent on Pokemon-style creature collecting mechanics. In 2024, after Palworld launched to wild success, the company registered a series of divisional patents under the previous patent's umbrella, describing more particular parts of the Pokeball mechanic.
The divisional patents are at the heart of Nintendo's lawsuit against Pocketpair. The Palworld developer pushed back with a number of examples of similar mechanics in games ranging from Final Fantasy 14 to Monster Hunter from well before Nintendo's patents were issued. These examples, Pocketpair hoped, would constitute prior art and diminish Nintendo's patent claims.
One such example that Pocketpair highlighted was a Dark Souls 3 mod called Pocket Souls, and that's the crux of a new bit of legal analysis from Florian Mueller at games fray. Nintendo says that mods can't count as prior art because they can't stand on their own. Mueller suggests that's an "extreme" position for the company to take, and "courts usually reject attempts to narrow the pool for prior art references in unreasonable ways."
It'll ultimately be up to the court to decide whether Nintendo's argument is valid, but if the company gets its way, that could set a dangerous precedent for the modding community.
"We are concerned about what an adoption of Nintendo's views by the Tokyo District Court and potentially other courts in the world would mean for the modder community," Mueller writes. "Apart from utter disregard for the enormous creativity with which modders contribute to game-related innovation, modders would become 'fair game' as their ideas could be patented by someone else (unless they file for patents first, which modders typically don't) and then, depending on the specific prior use rules in a jurisdiction, be used against them."
Of course, Nintendo's lawyers probably wouldn't look at any collateral damage against mods as a particularly worrying outcome. The company's already taken direct action against Nintendo-themed add-ons for Garry's Mod, the Zelda: Breath of the Wild multiplayer mod, and more, which has had Palworld modders feeling especially sketchy about Pokemon-themed mods. We'll have to wait and see what the courts have to say about this particular argument, though.
There are plenty more games like Pokemon out there, and Nintendo hasn't sued most of them... yet.
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