While everyone is patiently awaiting news from Nintendo regarding its upcoming Switch successor, the company made another, undoubtedly more surprising, announcement.
Months after Palworld's release, Nintendo has now filed a patent lawsuit against developer Pocketpair, claiming that Palworld "infringes multiple patent rights". Now, we all know that Nintendo can be utterly ruthless when it comes to protecting its intellectual property and, according to a new interview with games analyst Serkan Toto via 404 Media, the company is almost certainly going to win.
For starters, Toto mentions that Nintendo will have taken its time to build an absolutely air-tight case against Pocketpair, considering any potential counter arguements in order to ensure victory.
"So first of all this lawsuit is filed under Japanese law, so it has nothing to do with the US, nothing to do with the UK or EU law at all. And second point is that I think that Nintendo took its time to really build the case, map everything out, including counter arguments that the other side might bring up in a lawsuit, and how to counter them and make absolutely sure that they think they will win before filing the lawsuit."
He goes on to compare this current case with that of Colopl, a mobile developer known for a game called White Cat Project. Nintendo had made a series of copyright complaints dating as far back as 2016, but when these went unresolved, the company filed a patent lawsuit, eventually succeeding in a settlement of $20 million alongside ongoing licensing fees from Colopl.
A likely scenario, then, is that Nintendo has realised it cannot successfully sue Pocketpair for copyright infringement (i.e. the remarkably similar creature designs), and is therefore opting to focus on potential patent infringements (and for context, Stephen Totilo has posted an example of a patent that might be in the conversation; spoilers, it involves chucking items at creatures to capture them). Toto believes that Nintendo is attempting to "damage [Pocketpair] financially as much as they can" and will be pushing for licensing fees over a total shutdown of Palworld.
"Nintendo, of course, knows that Pocketpair this year made probably hundreds of millions of dollars in revenue, and also hundreds of millions dollars in profit. Because Pocketpair is a Japanese team the salaries are not as high as in the US. It's a small team. This is not a AAA game and it's not a very expensive game.
"So I think that the profit margin is probably sky high for Palworld and I think that Nintendo didn't like that one bit and said, look, they're basically stealing our character designs. We cannot do anything about this. So let's screw them with other things, like, again, patents that are very, very technical. The patents are not listed yet, so we don't know which patents. We don't know which patents Nintendo is actually talking about, but I bet with you already today that it's going to be highly, highly technical things."
Not everyone agrees, however. As reported by GamesRadar, business lawyer Richard Hoeg recently posted to social media to state his belief that "Nintendo may be reaching". Now, there are a couple of points to consider here: one is that, as stated by Hoeg himself, this is very much an "initial gut" reaction, and two, we simply don't know which patents are included in the case. Like Toto mentioned, they're likely extremely technical patents that outsiders such as ourselves are not aware of.
It's all very interesting stuff, and we're keen to see how this one plays out. However, the case against Colopl took several years to reach a settlement, so it's likely - especially given Palworld's popularity and exposure since its launch - that we'll be waiting a long time before we see any kind of resolution here. Watch this space.