2021 ‘Pokeball’ patent could be at the centre of Nintendo’s Palworld lawsuit

Nintendo and The Pokémon Company filed a lawsuit against Pocketpair this week, claiming that the studio's game ‘Palworld' infringes on a patent held by the company. While Nintendo has yet to let anyone, including Pocketpair, know what patent is at issue here, it is looking incredibly likely that a patent covering Pokeball mechanics is at the centre of the issue.

Nintendo didn't hold a patent for Pokeball mechanics until surprisingly recently – 2021 to be exact, the same year that Palworld was first announced. The patent itself covers the mechanical steps of aiming and throwing an object to capture a creature on the field, and then repeating that process to release creatures. The patent vaguely describes the Pokeball mechanic as throwing or aiming an item in virtual space, with the purpose of capturing or releasing a creature. The patent was granted to Nintendo in Japan back in December 2023, just one month before Palworld hit the market, and well after the game's announcement. Over in the US, Nintendo has not yet been granted the patent, and is still awaiting approval. The lawsuit has been filed in Japan specifically, where Nintendo does hold the patent. It also happens to be where both Nintendo and Pocketpair are based.

It is believed that Nintendo wanted to sue over character design similarities at first, but after months of investigation, realised that the case would not be strong enough, thus the pivot to a patent infringement argument.

Now the risk here for Nintendo is that the patent could be too broad, thus creating a monopoly. As pointed out by patent software patent expert, Florian Mueller, a Japanese court did have a case where a patent was thrown out due to monopoly concerns in recent years, but this wasn't a case involving the videogame industry. If Pocketpair can successfully argue that the patent would grant Nintendo a monopoly on games in this genre, then Nintendo may end up losing the patent. If things go the other way, then there will be a hard limit and legal precedence to stop any other developer from creating a game with creature capturing mechanics even remotely similar to what is found in Pokémon.

Patented game mechanics have been an issue in the games industry for a while. Back in the 90s, Namco held the patent for ‘minigames during loading screens', back during a time when loading times were much, much longer than they are today. In more recent years, Warner Bros was granted the patent for the ‘Nemesis system', which is why no other studio has attempted anything remotely similar to the mechanic. However, we typically don't see many patent infringement lawsuits in the games industry, with most cases instead focusing on copyright infringements rather than patent infringement. This is the reason why the whole industry is currently eyeing up this Palworld case. No matter which way it goes, it will have long-lasting effects on the industry at large.

KitGuru Says: While the timing of Nintendo's patent filing is a bit suspicious, it is also important to remember that this was right before Pokémon Legends: Arceus came out, and in that game, Nintendo finally transformed Pokémon catching into an active process of aiming and throwing, whereas in prior years, all you had to do was hit a menu button and wait for the dice roll to finish. 

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