Context: We are covering Nintendo and The Pokémon Company’s Japanese patent infringement lawsuit against Palworld maker Pocketpair in detail because it’s the most aggressive one of its kind and there are some interesting procedural developments, such as a rather puzzling patent amendment by Nintendo (July 16, 2025 games fray article). Nintendo introduced language into its smooth-switching-of-riding-objects patent (one of the three Japanese patents it is asserting against Palworld) for which we could not find a single case in the Darts-ip database of millions of patent cases where a court had to interpret a patent claim containing the term “even when” or “even if”. The case may face a delay as a result of this amendment, but we have not yet found out all the details because the case file is presently with the judge, so it cannot be inspected at the moment.
What’s new: On X (formerly known as Twitter), Chinese game maker HoYoverse previewed in-game footage of an upcoming game named Honkai: Nexus Anima that clearly infringes the amended version of Nintendo’s smooth-switching-of-riding objects patent. That is so because Nintendo changed the patent in a way that makes it broader and, therefore, a greater threat to the games industry at large.
Direct impact & wider ramifications: In a legal sense, it does not serve as a defense for one company if another infringes the same patent. However, one lesson to be learned from HoYoverse’s video is that Nintendo’s amended patent overreaches. It is a patent on simply being able to summon a flying object and mounting it. That is so basic that it cannot be right to prohibit all other game makers from implementing it. Furthermore, Nexus Anima arguably also involves Pokémon-like characters. The question is whether Nintendo decided to bully only a Japanese indie and doesn’t want to pick a fight with, for example, Chinese or U.S. companies.
Let’s look at the video first. The first 30 seconds contain the relevant footage:
In those first 30 seconds, you can see that the player character is capable of riding on ground objects (i.e., horse-like non-player characters, starting approximately 10 seconds into the video) as well as flying objects (i.e., bird-like non-player characters, such as a couple of seconds into the video). A gamer has drawn our attention to that video, which was released a few hours ago.
The video shows different scenes without a transition, so it is now known whether the player character can jump from a horse-like character on a bird-like one or the other way round. That was, but no longer is, a requirement to infringe one of Nintendo’s three Japanese patents-in-suit. A Japanese patent attorney looked at that patent (JP7528390) in its original form and expressed his view that Palworld did not come with the smooth-switching mechanism Nintendo’s patent covered, so in his view there was no infringement (January 26, 2025 games fray article).
Apparently Nintendo realized the weakness of its case over JP’390 as well, but only during the ongoing litigation, in which Pocketpair presented a number of defenses, which we found in the case file (at a time when the public could inspect it, we sent a lawyer to the Tokyo District Court) and reported on (April 28, 2025 games fray article).
So Nintendo saw that it was likely to lose over (at least) the smooth-switching-of-riding objects patent, and exercised its procedural rights to request a modification of the patent from the Japan Patent Office (JPO). That amendment is the one we mentioned further above.
What they did by means of the amendment was to drop the language that required a smooth switching between a flying object and a riding object.
With a patent that covers every scenario where you can “cause [an} aerial boarding character to appear in the virtual space” (meaning that you summon a bird-like character and it pops up near your characte) and then board it, Nintendo could go after a large number of game makers.
Pocketpair already demoed gliding objects in 2021, even before Nintendo filed its smooth-switching patent application (May 11, 2025 games fray article).
Patent offices should act as gatekeepers and not allow overbroad patent claims. It is a mystery why the Japan Patent Office allowed Nintendo to get away with its “even when” language. And when patent offices don’t perform that function, there’s always the court system.
Unlike in a field like trademark law, Nintendo will not lose its patent rights if it does not sue HoYoverse. Patent holders can arbitrarily pick one target and leave another one alone. But that is not a principled approach. If Nintendo is seriously concerned over Palworld, it must be equally concerned about Honkai: Nexus Anima.