If you see any underlined keywords (as opposed to links that specifically mention another article of ours), the related links point to our IP Lingo dictionary.
Context:
- In the spring, we sent a neutral person to the Tokyo District Court to inspect the Nintendo v. Pocketpair case file, enabling us to summarize Pocketpair’s defenses to Nintendo’s allegations that Palworld infringed three Japanese patents (April 18, 2025 games fray article). Since then it has been hard to get access again, and we suspected that Nintendo’s decision to amend one of its patents-in-suit in the middle of the litigation (July 16, 2025 games fray article) was a factor. Last month we saw a trailer promoting HoYoverse’s upcoming Honkai: Nexus Anima game, and Nintendo’s amended patent claims would arguably read on that one (August 29, 2025 games fray article).
- Separately from the Palworld case, but not entirely unrelated, we spotted a shockingly fundamental Nintendo patent that the United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) had granted (September 9, 2025 games fray article).
What’s new: Today, a neutral local luckily had the chance to inspect the case file on our behalf again. There clearly are delays and it looks like nothing will happen in that litigation during the remainder of this year. The most striking part is that Nintendo does not want to recognize mods as prior art (i.e., as previously published material that could be held against its patents). But there are also other observations that we will share below.
Direct impact: The judge will decide, but based on what games fray‘s sibling site ip fray (a premier resource on patent litigation) observes, courts usually reject attempts to narrow the pool for prior art references in unreasonable ways. Nintendo appears to be taking extreme positions.
Wider ramifications: We are concerned about what an adoption of Nintendo’s views by the Tokyo District Court and potentially other courts in the world would mean for the modder community. Apart from utter disregard for the enormous creativity with which modders contribute to game-related innovation, modders would become “fair game” as their ideas could be patented by someone else (unless they file for patents first, which modders typically don’t) and then, depending on the specific prior use rules in a jurisdiction, be used against them. For example, in the United States the thief would just have to file for patents within less than a year of the release of a given mod.
Mods as prior art: Nintendo says no
As we reported in the spring, Pocketpair pointed to MODs such as Pocket Souls (a Pokémon mod for Dark Souls 3) as prior art that serves to invalidate Nintendo’s patents. Nintendo argued (even in two different pleadings) that mods are not prior art because they don’t stand on their own like the games they run on.
This does not convince us from a patent law point of view. The question is not whether a gamer who sees the game would likely use the mod or the other way round. What matters is whether game makers looking for inspiration would turn to mods. Of course they would.
Technically, even the underlying games do not exist in a vacuum. For example, mobile games will run on iOS or Android.
Courts and patent offices the world over tend to define the scope of eligible prior art rather broadly (e.g., July 2, 2025 ip fray article).
Scope of injunction
Nintendo is seeking an injunction despite the fact that even if one assumed (purely for the sake of the argument) that Nintendo’s patents are valid and Pocketpair used to infringe them, Pocketpair would have worked around them by now. Where we agree with Nintendo is that if (a big if!) there was an infringement in the past, there is a risk of future infringements. Nintendo does have a point that Pocketpair could undo the changes it made. But Pocketpair equally understandably argues that any hypothetical injunction would have be worded in a way that does not impact perfectly lawful versions of Palworld.
High-level observations
Nintendo tries to persuade the court to interpret all three patents very broadly. That, however, makes them particularly susceptible to invalidity contentions, which is presumably part of the reason why Nintendo wants the court to exclude mods from the prior art. Pocketpair places a lot of emphasis on the validity problems facing Nintendo’s patents, arguing that it is easy to show even just with gameplay videos that certain ideas were not new when Nintendo filed the original patent applications in late 2021. Pocketpair also stresses that Palworld is an open-world action game while Pokémon is traditionally more turn-based. In that regard, however, we find it interesting that Pokémon Pokopia (September 12, 2025 announcement) is a spinoff that bears a strong resemblance to Palworld’s base-building mechanics. It would be interesting to see what gamers thought when they saw the related YouTube video, but comments were switched off…
Patent #1 infringement discussion
With respect to an operation to cast capture items or battle characters, Nintendo argues that “based on pressing an operation button” does not mean that there is only one common operation button. Pocketpair, however, says it would be an unreasonable interpretation to understand “a button” to mean different buttons.
Pocketpair furthermore denies that Palworld has the “category group selection” feature found in the patent claim, but to Nintendo, readying a capture item or a battle character is, in and of itself, an act of selecting the relevant category group. This looks like Nintendo would like to read out a step from the patent claim.
Nintendo wants any encounter of characters that results in a battle to satisfy the claim language with respect to “initiating battle when released in a battle-enabled location.” But Pocketpair says that the deployment of a character somewhere on the field does not directly cause combat with wild creatures.
Patent #2 infringement discussion
Pocketpair criticizes Nintendo’s take that the patent claims do not specify the characteristics of a “first mode” and a “second move”, so in practice Nintendo wants those terms to be meaningless. Pocketpair disputes that specific Pal skills such as the “Pentama Launcher” constitute modes.
Patent #3 infringement discussion
This is the patent Nintendo amended. Nintendo calls the amendment a clarification, but it is a massive broadening. Palworld argues that it doesn’t even infringe the broadened patent because Nintendo itself treated ArcheAge characters as “items,” so Palworld’s gliding Pals should be viewed the same way. Here we feel that the outcome is more likely to depend on validity.
What’s next?
At some point the court will presumably share its preliminary view with the parties, but Nintendo’s amended patent appears to have slowed down everything. Based on what we saw in the spring, we expected something interesting to happen still in 2025. Not anymore. But rest assured that once anything happens, we’ll try our best to find out early and will report.