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Nintendo has run into another issue during its ongoing legal battle against Pocketpair’s open-world survival game Palworld. As reported by GamesFray, one of the Nintendo patents related to the case has been rejected by the Japan Patent Office (JPO) for lacking originality.
Back in September 2024, Nintendo and The Pokémon Company officially announced they were filing a patent infringement lawsuit in Japan against Pocketpair’s open-world survival game Palworld. The case involves three main patents granted by the JPO: two related to monster capture and release, and one related to riding characters.
These patents were all filed and approved in 2024, but are derived from earlier Nintendo patents dating from 2021. It seems that Nintendo geared these divisional patents to fight specifically against Palworld’s alleged infringement of the originals. Since then, the case has rumbled on with Nintendo even rewriting a mount-related patent mid-lawsuit, and arguing that mods should not count as prior art.
However, one patent in this family of monster capture patents that Nintendo filed in 2024 has yet to be approved. In October, the JPO pointed out that this patent lacks an inventive step, making a non-final decision to reject the application. The office’s reasoning for the
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