Nintendo’s Lawsuit Against Pocketpair Just Seems So Silly

When Pocketpair first announced Palworld and dropped the original trailer, my first thought was, “Oh. Nintendo is going to be mad about this." After all, it not only offered similar mechanics to Pokémon, but it looked like Pokémon. There were several Pals that I saw in the video that made me go, “But isn’t that actually a Pokémon?”

Of course, there are differences. The survival game aspects and things like factory and gun building make it a different game. Yet, that was another reason I expected Nintendo to sue before the game ever launched. Surely neither they nor The Pokémon Company wanted their game associated with guns and what looked to be sweatshops.

To be honest, in our early discussions, we also considered that Square Enix might have something to say, considering one of the Pals building guns looked a bit like a carbuncle – enough so that one of our writers began calling it the “gunbunkle”. As the majority of the creatures seemed to resemble Pokémon that closely, it seemed Nintendo would be the most likely to go after this little company.

But they didn’t. In fact, things rolled on for a while with Palworld eventually launching before Nintendo even said they were going to look into it.

Now, yes, at this point, I know that commercial copyright doesn’t work quite that way, and Nintendo really wouldn’t have gotten anywhere had they tried suing at the time. But from an outside perspective, it would seem like the most likely reason to sue Pockepair, as it seems they could argue customer confusion between the two products.

That said, what does not seem like the most logical thing to do is to create patents for game mechanics after the fact. Yes, Nintendo and the Pokémon company may have "invented" these mechanics, but, as has been pointed out by Pocketpair, theirs are not the only games that use these mechanics.

The question then becomes, where was the hand-wringing when all these other games were using capture mechanics, throwing mechanics, and so on? It’s a good question, and one that needs to be answered properly. The longer this goes on, and the more games Pockepair continues to point out as examples of games that use these mechanics, the sillier Nintendo and The Pokémon Company look.