The wheels of the litigation process continue to slowly turn between Nintendo and Palworld developer Pocketpair. Readers no doubt remember that Nintendo slapped Pocketpair with a patent lawsuit in Japan last September that claimed Palworld infringed on some very broad-sounding game mechanics while seeking $66K in damages and an injunction against the survival sandbox. Nintendo has also been potentially gearing up for a patent lawsuit in the US as well, pushing through four anti-Palworld patents through the US Patent Office over the past several months.
Thanks to analysis from Games Fray, we now have an idea of the defense Pocketpair is using against the allegations in a February filing in Japan, and most of them draw from multiple prior art examples from earlier title releases that utilize the very same gameplay mechanics that Nintendo argues Pocketpair ripped off. These include indicators for throwing an item in Rune Factory and Pikmin 3 Deluxe, smoothly riding on creatures in ARK, and character capturing mechanics in mods like Nukamon and games like Octopath Traveler.
In very short summary, Pocketpair argues that these multiple earlier releases render Nintendo’s patents invalid, but the filing also has some other arguments to fall back on, such as a free technology defense, the fact that Palworld and Pokemon are not in the same genre, and a host of non-infringement arguments that go through the entire list of Nintendo’s patent claims.
