It’s been six months to the day since Nintendo and The Pokemon Company announced they were suing Pocketpair, the developer behind the “Pokemon with guns” survival game Palworld. After months of controversy surrounding the game’s various alleged Pokemon knock-offs a lawsuit seemed inevitable, and the internet was lit ablaze with reactions to the legal, ethical, and business ramifications of Nintendo going after a smaller company. Pocketpair, meanwhile, reacted with surprise and sadness, according to community manager John Buckley.
As reported by PC Gamer, while speaking at a 2025 Game Developers Conference sessionBuckley said Pocketpair developers were taken aback by the lawsuit. The studio believed it had taken all necessary steps to avoid any such action, but what the team hadn’t expected was for Nintendo to go after patents rather than copyright infringement.
“We did legal checks before Palworld released and they were all cleared in Japan,” Buckley remembers. “So obviously when the lawsuit was announced we were like, ‘What?’ And we went back to the lawyers, and the lawyers contacted the courts and asked, ‘What’s going on?’ and that’s when we realized it was patents they were going for.”
Palworld’s monster designs have been under scrutiny for being incredibly similar to those of Pokemon, but Nintendo and The Pokemon Company’s lawsuit instead focused on patented mechanics, like throwing an object to capture a critter. Buckley says the day the lawsuit happened was a dark time for the studio, and it even went as far as to hire additional security at an industry event as a precautionary measure.
“Pretty much everyone at Pocketpair is a huge fan, so it was a very depressing day, everyone heads down and walking in the rain,” he said. “It changed a lot of things for us. We were just about to release the PlayStation version, we were just about to go to Tokyo Game Show, so obviously we had to scale back a little bit and hire security guards and stuff like that.”
Despite all the controversy, Palworld has been a runaway success, having accumulated over 32 million players in the past year. Pocketpair announced in July 2024 that it was forming Palworld Entertainment in conjunction with Sony to further merchandise the game.
