Palworld developer Pocketpair officially responds to Nintendo lawsuit

Palworld developer Pocketpair has delivered a statement regarding Nintendo's recent lawsuit.

Nintendo is officially suing the Japanese team behind Palworld, aka the "Pokemon with guns" indie that took the world by storm in early 2024. But Nintendo isn't suing for likeness rights violations, or any type of copyright issue. Instead, Nintendo is alleging that Pocketpair has somehow violated Nintendo's patent rights.

Official details about the case remain unknown, and the lawsuit has been filed in Japanese courts. Nintendo's statement on the matter is quite clipped and dry, but the company did say that the lawsuit was made only after "careful investigation" of Palworld. Now Pocketpair has responded with a statement of their own:

We have received notice of this lawsuit and will begin the appropriate legal proceedings and investigations into the claims of patent infringement.

At this moment, we are unaware of the specific patents we are accused of infringing upon, and we have not been notified of such details.

Pocketpair is a small indie game company based in Tokyo. Our goal as a company has always been to create fun games. We will continue to pursue this goal because we know that our games bring joy to millions of gamers around the world. Palworld was a surprise success this year, both for gamers and for us. We were blown away by the amazing response to the game and have been working hard to make it even better for our fans. We will continue improving Palworld and strive to create a game that our fans can be proud of.

It is truly unfortunate that we will be forced to allocate significant time to matters unrelated to game development due to this lawsuit. However, we will do our utmost for our fans, and to ensure that indie game developers are not hindered or discouraged from pursuing their creative ideas.

We apologize to our fans and supporters for any worry or discomfort that this news has caused.

As always, thank you for your continued support of Palworld and Pocketpair.