It’s taken a lot longer than you would’ve thought but Nintendo and The Pokémon Company are suing Palworld and trying to get it shut down.
You don’t need to be a legal expert to know that Palworld is sailing very close to the wind in terms of how closely it resembles Pokémon. The gameplay is actually quite a bit different, with an emphasis on survival and base-building, as well as just catching wild critters, but the design of the various ‘pals’ seems like a red rag to a bull when it comes to Nintendo’s notoriously efficient lawyers.
Only earlier this week, The Pokémon Company, which is part owned by Nintendo, won $11 million in damages from mobile games that were copying Pokémon even more blatantly, but now, fresh off that victory, both Nintendo and The Pokémon Company are gunning for Palworld.
They’re tag-teaming Palworld developer Pocketpair for damages and are also seeking an ‘injunction’, which is almost certainly an attempt to get the game shut down, because it ‘infringes multiple patent rights’.
Will Palworld be shut down?
The Pokémon Company did comment on Palworld shortly after its release, stating that they intended to ‘investigate and take appropriate measures to address any acts that infringe on intellectual property rights related to the Pokémon.’
Apparently, those investigations are now over, although a former Nintendo legal boss already dismissed Palworld as ‘rip-off nonsense’ and expressed surprise that it wasn’t dealt with more quickly.
A brief message was posted on Nintendo’s website on Wednesday night, stating that: ‘This lawsuit seeks an injunction against infringement and compensation for damages on the grounds that Palworld infringes multiple patent rights.’
‘Nintendo will continue to take necessary actions against any infringement of its intellectual property rights including the Nintendo brand itself, to protect the intellectual properties it has worked hard to establish over the years.’
Palworld was originally released in January this year and instantly broke records on Steam, as one of the most popular video games ever. Its popularity has dipped significantly since then, but it’s still usually within the top 60 games played on PC.
The game was also a major success on Xbox and is widely expected to be announced for PlayStation 5 next week, at the Tokyo Game Show.
It’s not clear whether that, or any other specific development, has been the catalyst for this long-awaited lawsuit but it may be simply that the lawyers needed time to prepare – after all, there is a reason they win so much.
Why is Palworld being sued by Nintendo and The Pokémon Company?
Palworld’s creator Takuro Mizobe has always seemed to have a peculiarly apathetic attitude to the prospect of being sued and, indeed, most other things, proclaiming that he tries ‘to avoid creating new things’ and that ‘to make new things is very hard.’
As far as many fans are concerned – some of who issued death threats against Pocketpair – Mizobe and his team haven’t made anything new at all, with many suspecting that AI was used to rip-off existing Pokémon designs, blending various elements together to make ‘new’ creatures.
Nintendo certainly isn’t going to have much trouble proving that the designs are very similar to Pokémon but whether they can win the money they seek, and get the game shut down, remains to be seen.
Although the PlayStation 5 news is expected this month, Pocketpair recently announced that they would not be turning the game into a live service title, as that’s not what it was originally designed as – even though it’s very similar to existing games like Ark: Survival Evolved and Rust.
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