Palworld developer Pocketpair didn’t see the ongoing legal action between it and the combination of Nintendo and The Pokemon Company coming, according to the game’s community manager, who says news of the suit came as a “shock” because patent infringement was “something that no one even considered”.
In case you’ve been living under a rock with your pals, Nintendo and The Pokemon Company filed a lawsuit against Pocketpair over Palworld last September, alleging that the game “infringes multiple patent rights”. There’s been a lot of speculation as to how it might play out, but all we can do is wait and see.
Speaking at GDC (thanks, GamesRadar), Palworld community manager John ‘Bucky’ Buckley outlined what things were like at the studio when news of Ninty and TPC’s legal action drapped.
“This obviously came as a shock to us,” Buckley said of the suit, “I think it came as a shock to a lot of people because it’s alleged patent infringement, which is something that no one even considered, and it’s something that we’re still hashing out basically.”
He added that Pocketpair had been “pretty vocal before Palworld released that we did legal checks before the game released, and they were all cleared – in Japan”. So, the day the news dropped was apparently a “pretty depressing” one, with Buckley revealing that the lawsuit’s arrival “changed a lot of things” for Pocketpair.
“We were just about to release the PlayStation version,” the CM said if these changes, “We were just about to go to Tokyo Game Show. Obviously, we had to kind of scale back a little bit and hire security guards and stuff like that.”
In addition to an injunction against Palworld, Pocketpair detailed last year that payments of “five million yen plus late payment damages” to both Nintendo and TPC individially are being sought in the suit, meaning the total payment facing Pocketpair if it were to lose the case could be around ten million yen.
