In 2024, Nintendo and The Pokemon Company sued Palworld developer Pocketpair on patent infringement claims, and now Palworld’s community manager has revealed more details on how it all went down.
Appearing at GDC 2025 this week, community manager John Buckley said Pocketpair did “legal checks” prior to Palworld’s release to try to mitigate a lawsuit risk in Japan, PC Gamer reported. Given that, Buckley said the team was confused when Nintendo and The Pokemon Company sued Pocketpair in Japan.
“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,'” Buckley said.