Nintendo finally gets around to suing "Pokémon with guns" game Palworld

Eight months after announcing its intent to “investigate and take appropriate measures” against 2024 video game hit Palworld for allegedly infringing on its Pokémon patents, Nintendo is now taking developer Pocketpair to court. In a press release issued by the video game giant, Nintendo announced that it had, “together with The Pokémon Company, filed a patent infringement lawsuit in the Tokyo District Court against Pocketpair, Inc.” (The Pokémon Company, which controls licensing, publishing, and brand management for the massive gaming brand, is co-owned by Nintendo, Creatures, Inc., and Game Freak, the studio that actually makes most of the Pokémon games.) The tersely worded press release asserts that the “lawsuit seeks an injunction against infringement and compensation for damages on the grounds that Palworld, a game developed and released by the Defendant, infringes multiple patent rights.”

And, to be fair, a lot of people have been waiting for this particular brightly colored cartoon shoe to drop for a while: Palworld was a massive smash hit when it released back in early 2024, selling more than 8 million copies within its first week of release, and logging more than 2 million concurrent users on Steam. (Note to non-gamers: That is a shit-ton, especially for a game from an unknown studio releasing their game into Early Access.) It also garnered a lot of accusations that its various cheerful monsters—who players can arm with guns, work to death in an environment that cheerfully boasts “no labor laws,” and then hack up and eat, all gleefully subverting the Pokémon formula—were blatantly copied from the Nintendo franchise, on account of people having eyes, and thus being able to look at them and instantly say “Gosh, that sure looks a lot like a Pokémon.”

Pocketpair representatives and developers, though, have always claimed that they were merely inspired by the older series, and that their game had cleared legal review with its designs. Which is now, apparently, going to be tested in court—with the most surprising thing here, honestly, being that it took Nintendo this long to pull the trigger.