Yesterday, Nintendo announced they would be filing a lawsuit against Palworld developer Pocketpair, claiming that they game violated a number of patents held by Nintendo. This was met with a response from Pocketpair, where they implied they would take Nintendo on in court to defend their game.

Being a based in Tokyo Japan, Pocketpair posted their statement both in English and in Japanese, where it has been met with many replies from fans. What is particularly interesting is that Japanese and English speaking fans seem to have differing sentiments towards the lawsuit.

Most English-speaking fans are in support of Pocketpair and Palworld, criticizing Nintendo for going after the game. Many claim that Nintendo is just bitter about Palworld‘s success, and that they have no right to sue over Palworld using similar gameplay to Pokemon.

“Best of luck. Instead of bullying smaller companies the ones going after you guys should make better products. They fear you. Your product is better than anything they have been making in over 10 years.”

“Palworld is 100x better than Pokémon. If they are coming after you, you’re doing something right.”

“Claims of Patent infringement. In other words, we literally have nothing except the concept idea on how to capture a pokemon”

“If it is indeed (as the announcement suggests) about technical patents and not design rights, then (as I explained in an earlier X post) this is not about what your Palworld characters look like but simply bullying by an older and larger company with a certain patent arsenal.”

“They have zero reason to be suing you guys. They had no problems with Digimon for 20 years. I hope the judge throws out the case on day 1.”

“Nintendo would rather sue, than innovate the Pokemon video game series to more modern standards. Best of luck in your proceedings!”

However, most responses from Japanese-speaking fans are critical of Pocketpair, calling them out for “playing the victim” as a “small indie studio” being “bullied” by Nintendo, especially since Pocketpair has a history of copying gameplay and design ideas from both high profile and indie games.

You can read some of the responses from Japanese-speaking fans below, via Machine Translation.

“They’ve been working with companies like Sony and Microsoft on such a large scale, making loads of money, and now when things start to look a little shaky they’re like, “We’re a small company! The big companies are bullying us. Help us!” It’s hilarious that they take a stance like that.”

“People call it an indie game, but everyone just thinks it’s a Pokémon rip-off (laughs). If you’re going to say it’s an impediment to development, you should first create a game full of original elements first 🤔”

“Nintendo is so friendly to indies that they make the effort to create special features for indie titles every time. This time it has nothing to do with being an indie or anything, they just got scolded because they crossed the line.”

“If that’s the case, shouldn’t the company representative first apologize for the provocative and abusive remarks he made in the past? I think that playing the victim only when it’s convenient will only make users distrust you.”

“I don’t think the size of the company matters, but if you think that your claim will be accepted, does that mean it’s okay if an individual is infringing on your company’s rights?”

“It’s a stretch to make this a battle between indie and Nintendo”

Given that Nintendo filed the lawsuit in their home country of Japan, where fan sentiment is mostly against Pocketpair, the Palworld developer’s chances of getting out of it victorious look grim. Stay tuned for more updates as they come.

What do you think? Let us know in the comments.