According to Pocketpair, these are the patents Nintendo and the Pokémon Company are suing Palworld over

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Palworld creators Pocketpair have finally revealed what patents Nintendo and the Pokémon Company are suing them for. They seem to focus on throwing capsule items to catch or release monsters, including using the monsters as mounts.

If you somehow haven’t encountered Palworld yet, it’s a best-selling survival game that takes huge – some would say outrageous – inspiration from Pokémon, in which players poach Pokésque creatures with magic balls and deploy them as soldiers and minions.

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When Palworld hit Steam in January, some Pokémon players shouted that it had broken Pokémon copyrights. After an ominous hiatus, Nintendo announced legal proceedings against Pocketpair in September, stating that the corporation “will continue to take necessary actions against any infringements of its intellectual property rights, including the Nintendo brand itself, in order to protect the intellectual property it has worked hard to develop over the years “

Instead of following the designs of Palworld’s monsters, which certainly closely resemble some Pokémon, Nintendo claims that Pocketpair has infringed its patents on certain game mechanics. They didn’t specify which patents at the time, but Pocketpair has currently listed three of them post published today. They also report that Nintendo and the Pokémon Company are seeking an injunction against Palworld along with damages for delayed payment for the employ of their patents.

The format of Pocketpair’s post makes the exact amount of compensation requested unclear – it could be that Nintendo and the Pokémon Company want five million yen each, or a total of five million yen. To be clear, Pokémon Company is not a subsidiary of Nintendo, but the result of a joint investment between the companies that own the copyrights and trademarks to Pokémon – Game Freak, Creatures and Nintendo.

“Plaintiffs claim that Palworld, which we released on January 19, 2024, infringes the following three patents held by Plaintiffs and seeks an injunction against the game and compensation for part of the damages incurred between the date of registration of the patents and the date of filing the lawsuit,” the post reads.

The patents in question were all applied for and registered this year, following the launch of early access to Palworld, although they appear to be based on older “parent” patents. They are: Patent No. 7,545,191, filed on July 30 and registered on August 27; Patent No. 7,493,117, filed on February 26 and registered on May 22, and Patent No. 7,528,390, filed on March 5 and registered on July 26.

I checked the patent numbers on the website Japanese patent information platformi.e. J-PlatPat, which has machine translation from Japanese to English. Here are their machine translated overviews. There is of course much more detail on each page of the patent, including diagrams, but this should give you a scratchy guide.

Patent No. 7545191

“Determining, in a first mode, an aiming direction in virtual space based on the input of a second operation, and causing, in a second mode, the player character to fire in the aiming direction at an object that affects a field character placed on a field in virtual space based on the input third surgery. Based on the input of the second operation, the aiming direction is determined, and based on the input of the third operation, the player character is forced to shoot the combat character in the aiming direction.

Patent No. 7493117

“The aiming direction in the virtual space is determined based on the input of the second operation in the first mode, the player character can release an item affecting the field character placed on the field in the virtual space towards the aiming direction based on the third operation, the aiming direction is determined based on the input the second operation in the second mode, and the played character can release a fighting character that fights towards the aim, based on the input of the third operation.

Patent No. 7528390

“In one example of a game program, a ground ride object or an air ride object is selected through a selection operation, and the player character is forced to ride the selected ride object. In the event that a player character riding a flying object moves towards the ground, the state automatically changes to the player character riding the flying object on the ground, allowing the player character to move on the ground.

Pocketpair persists. “We will continue to reaffirm our position on this matter through future legal proceedings,” they write in the recent post. For now, they are not responding to individual media inquiries – we will all find out more via their website.

Update: I added a line to clarify that while the above patents appear to have been registered this year, they are based on older patents that predated the launch of Palworld Early Access.

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