Nintendo’s efforts to patent the idea of summoning a videogame character and letting it fight another character have suffered a significant reversal in the USA, even as the Mario makers continue a copyright infringement lawsuit against Palworld developers Pocketpair in Japan. The United States Patent and Trademark Office has now revoked the character-summoning patent in question, though their decision is “non-final”. Nintendo have two months to respond and argue their case.
Nintendo have been fighting a legal battle against Pocketpair and Palworld since September 2024, when they filed suit for infringement of patent rights in the Tokyo District Court. If you’re new to Palworld, it’s a monster-catching survival game with designs screechingly reminiscent of Nintendo’s Pokémon series. According to one lawyer we interviewed, however, this isn’t a case of copyright theft. Instead, Nintendo are trying to make the argument that Pocketpair have stolen their innovative ideas for game mechanics, including the lobbing of balls containing munsters that fight on your behalf.
Nintendo’s accompanying applications for patents on mechanics used by Pokémon have legal ramifications for many existing games and forthcoming projects, besides Palworld. The idea of summoning a character to fight on your behalf isn’t exactly niche, after all. If Nintendo are able to enshrine it as their intellectual property, a whole bunch of developers, from Atlus to FromSoftware, could theoretically face penalties or be required to alter their games.
Pocketpair have already made some changes to Palworld to stave off the wrath of Nintendo’s lawyers, though they’re defiant on the whole, declaring that “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”.
Nintendo’s US patent with regard to character-summoning and battling was originally granted on 2nd September 2025. Catchily known as US Patent No. 12,403,397, it consists of 26 individual patent claims. As reported by games industry regulatory analyst Games Fray, USPTO director John A. Squires ordered a reexamination of the character-summoning patent last November, to decide whether it should have been granted in the first place.
Nintendo didn’t respond to the order by the deadline, so the examination process went ahead without them. Last week, the examiner gave a non-final decision rejecting Nintendo’s patent claims with regard to a “storage medium, information processing system, information processing apparatus, and game processing method”.
Nintendo have two months to respond, though they can ask for an extension. Game Fray note that the USPTO examiner has complicated the situation by not basing the rejection on any actual game. Instead, the USPTO justify the rejections with reference to “prior art” – in this case, older patent applications filed by Nintendo, Konami, and Bandai Namco. As such they feel that the new patent claim is not innovative enough to make the cut. Per the analyst’s glossary, it represents “an obvious idea to combine two or more pre-existing concepts in a way that a person having ordinary skill in the art would have done anyway.”
Nintendo have sought to control the definition of prior art in their Tokyo District Court lawsuit, arguing that Pokémon-style mods of other games don’t count. In addition to filing for patents in the USA, they have modified existing Japanese patents to support their courtroom scuffle with Pocketpair. As for Pocketpair, they’re still making plenty of cash from Palworld despite the legal difficulties, having signed a deal with Sony to turn the game into a crossmedia enterprise.
I am not a creature of massive legal expertise – I am the guy you go to for jokes about Lamballs – so if you’re interested/alarmed/enthused, I encourage you to plunge into the USPTO’s full 104 page report, featured by Games Fray. But the broad takeaway is that Nintendo’s efforts to ring-fence a pretty familiar videogame mechanic are not going as swimmingly as they hope.
