Pokemon vs. Palworld Lawsuit May Involve This "Killer" Pokeball Patent

Pokemon and Nintendo may be suing Palworld over this particular patent.

By Tanner Dedmon

The Pokemon Company and Nintendo are together suing the Palworld creator, Pocketpair, which may not have been much of a surprise to many, but what was surprising was that the pair weren't going after Pocketpair over copyright infringement allegations. Instead, the statement from The Pokemon Company and Nintendo specifically said Palworld "infringes multiple patent rights." The patents that the monster-catching game released this year supposedly infringes on weren't name in the announcement from The Pokemon Company and Nintendo, but one patent attorney may have found what he calls a "killer patent" in the Pokemon vs. Palworld case.

For Yahoo Japan, patent attorney Kiyoshi Kurihara shared a breakdown of the patent in question. After first narrowing down the possibilities by looking at patents that both The Pokemon Company and Nintendo have stakes in. One of those is a patent detailing a process through which a player would catch some sort of creature they found -- a Pokemon in the Pokemon series or a Pal in Palworld, for examples -- at which point the creature would be in their possession.

That's essentially monster taming which is a pretty common feature in many games like these, but the patent covers a bit more than just catching monsters. While it uses the usual nonspecific jargon found in these patents that make them so broad, the patent does lay out a catching process which sounds pretty similar to the one used in Palworld. It outlines a process where players would look towards a "field character" in front of the player, release a "capture item" that strikes the character, and if successful, the creature then belongs to the player.

There's talk of success indicators too to show how likely a capture will be which could be things like color as opposed to the percentages that Palworld uses. Palworld's Pal Spheres are colored differently depending on how powerful they are just like Pokeballs in the Pokemon game which may also prove problematic for Palworld if that's what this patent is covering. Kurihara said that there may be other patents to explain later that would be used in the Pokemon vs. Palworld case, but this one in particular involving Pokeballs is one he considers a "killer patent" in the case. 

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The Pokemon patent covering a monster-catching mechanic.

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The image above from taken from the filed patent shows an illustration of the protected process. It's something Pokemon players will be all too familiar with, but it's worth pointing out that this setup looks much more like the one used in Pokemon Legends: Arceus which was released in 2022 while the patent itself was filed in 2021. The more open-world catching mechanics in Palworld are much more similar to those in Arceus as opposed to the more traditional Pokemon games.

Pocketpair has already said in a follow-up statement that the Palworld developer was "unaware of the specific patents" it's accused of infringing on. Neither The Pokemon Company nor Nintendo have specified either, but based on what's been found so far, it wouldn't be surprising if this creature-catching patent is involved.

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