Nintendo's announcement that it was suing Pocketpair, the developer of the massively successful Palworld, came as a shock last year, not the least to Pocketpair itself. The lawsuit stunned the games industry, and internally, it sent Pocketpair scrambling for answers.
Looking back on the studio's reaction to the lawsuit during a talk at GDC 2025 today, Pocketpair global community manager John Buckley said that "it didn't feel good obviously" when the announcement arrived.
"We did legal checks before Palworld released and they were all cleared in Japan," Buckley remembers. "So obviously when the lawsuit was announced we were like, 'What?' And we went back to the lawyers, and the lawyers contacted the courts and asked, 'What's going on?' and that's when we realized it was patents they were going for."
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Nintendo announced the lawsuit in September 2024, asking for an injunction against Palworld as well as 5 million yen (around $33,476 in the current exchange rate) for infringement on three separate patents, among them the similarity of the "Pal Sphere" to the Pokémon series' PokeBalls. Nintendo had registered the patents in a filing not long after Palworld's release, setting the stage for the lawsuit.
Buckley remembers the announcement as a "very depressing day" for the studio.
"Pretty much everyone at Pocketpair is a huge fan, so it was a very depressing day, everyone heads down and walking in the rain," he said. "It changed a lot of things for us. We were just about to release the PlayStation version, we were just about to go to Tokyo Game Show, so obviously we had to scale back a little bit and hire security guards and stuff like that."
Pocketpair released a statement shortly after the lawsuit was filed, calling it "truly unfortunate" while apologizing to fans.
At his GDC talk, Buckley also discussed the general reaction to Palworld's launch, which included accusations of plagiarism. "I think very few companies could survive a post-Palworld situation like we did," he said.
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