Nintendo Is Wrong on One Patent Claim Against Palworld
Nintendo is suing Palworld creator Pocketpair on three separate patent claims. One of these patents involves the unique mechanics of rideable creatures. However, the novel aspects of Nintendo’s patent and the riding mechanics in Palworld do not align.
Attribution
Ball on White Surface by Caleb Oquendo on Pexels
On January 19, 2024, Pocketpair released a game called Palworld which took the gaming world by storm. Over the next month, the game surpassed 25 million players between computer and console platforms. There was debate amongst the gaming community about whether Palworld copied elements of Pokémon in the design of the Pals. Most fans expected a lawsuit from Nintendo at some point but did not know what form of IP litigation Nintendo would pursue.
On November 8, 2024, Nintendo sued Pocketpair in Japan related to three separate patents. It seems the technology in the patents stems from the Nintendo game Pokémon Legends: Arceus. The first and second patents listed are related to the creature catching mechanics, while the third relates to the creature riding mechanics. This article will focus on the third patent, which is related to the mechanics of the rideable creatures in each game.
In video games, a rideable creature is typically called a “mount.” Mounts in video games date back to the 1980s and are usually animals which allow a player to traverse the world more easily. They come in the form of horses, birds, fish, or more fantasy-type animals like dragons. Players can gallop on land while riding a horse, fly over mountains on a dragon, or swim through rivers and oceans on sea creatures. Nintendo’s patent gives them exclusive rights to certain unique mechanics involving transitioning between creatures when riding a mount. For example, if a player is flying on the “bird character” and dives towards a river, the mount will change to the “fish character” to enable swimming without the player giving any additional inputs (See Fig. 15, page 38). While this mechanic seems novel to the Pokémon Legends: Arceus game, the mount transition mechanic is not in Palworld.
The available mounts in Palworld have similar functions to Pokémon Legends: Arceus. Both games enable the player to fly, glide, swim, climb, and run on mounts. However, if you take a flying, gliding, or running mount towards a body of water in Palworld, no transition will occur. For the flying Pals, you will hover over the water indefinitely. For the gliding Pal, you will continue to lose altitude until the player is swimming in the river. For the running Pals, you will stay on the mount until they run out of stamina and become knocked out. I have personally tested these transitions while playing both games. These three examples undermine the core of Nintendo’s lawsuit on this patent.
Another functional distinction between the two mount systems is that the Palworld system is a two-step function while Pokémon Legends: Arceus uses a one-step function.
To understand this, it is important to understand how mountable creatures are acquired in each game. While the player can capture creatures in both games, only in Palworld can you ride the creatures you capture. In Palworld, the player must craft saddles to turn captured Pals into mounts. In Pokémon Legends: Arceus, there are no capturable Pokémon that can be ridden. The rideable Pokémon can only be acquired as rewards through completing story quests.
In Palworld, the player must first send out their captured Pal by pressing a button on the keyboard and then mount the Pal by holding a different button. In Pokémon Legends: Arceus, the player does not need to send out the Pokémon before riding it. There is a visible mount menu in the bottom right of the screen and one mount is always available to ride (See Fig 9, page 37). The player can cycle through the mounts using left and right on the directional pad and then press a button to ride the selected mount without the intermediate step of sending it out first.
If Nintendo wants to challenge the mount system, this one-step/two-step distinction seems too different to say that Palworld is infringing on the patent. Nintendo may argue that selecting a Pokémon from the directional pad menu and then pressing a button is equivalent to the two separate keyboard button presses in Palworld. Pocketpair can argue that the step of sending out a Pal that can be mounted or used for other actions makes it different from Nintendo’s patent. Pocketpair can also argue that the way Palworld players use mounts mirrors the non-novel way many video games have historically used mounts, such as World of Warcraft.
Despite the “lower hurdle” of patentable subject matter eligibility in Japan, I do not think Nintendo will win on this patent claim. The novelty requirement still exists in Japanese patent law (Article 29), and what is novel about Nintendo’s patent does not line up with the actual gameplay of Palworld’s mounts. If Nintendo somehow wins on this claim, it is unclear how any game company moving forward can include features that have existed for decades without fear of being sued.