Earlier this week, Nintendo filed a lawsuit against Palworld creator Pocketpair, alleging that their game had violated several of Nintendo’s patents.

Following this announcement, industry analysts are weighing in on how this lawsuit could turn out for the two parties involved. In an interview with 404 Media, Dr Serken Toto said he felt confident that Nintendo would win it’s lawsuit against Pocketpair, stating that Nintendo has a strong track record of legal victories in its home country of Japan, and that they wouldn’t file a suit unless they had an absolutely airtight case.

So first of all this lawsuit is filed under Japanese law, so it has nothing to do with the US, nothing to do with the UK or EU law at all. And second point is that I think that Nintendo took its time to really build the case, map everything out, including counter arguments that the other side might bring up in a lawsuit, and how to counter them and make absolutely sure that they think they will win before filing the lawsuit.

Toto also believes that the suit will likely end in a settlement where Pocketpair pays Nintendo licensing fees to continue developing Palworld, citing Nintendo’s lawsuit against Colopl, developers of White Cat Project, which eventually ended with a similar outcome.

So they had this legal battle. Colopl said, no way, but in 2021 they had a settlement where Nintendo got the equivalent of $20 Million US dollars and Colopl is now paying licensing fees to Nintendo for continuing to use the patents inside their mobile game. So it was a complete win for Nintendo, even though it was technically a settlement.

Toto goes on to speculate that Nintendo’s goal is to damage Pocketpair financially with the fees, indirectly punishing Palworld for copying character designs and other mechanics from Pokemon.

Nintendo, of course, knows that Pocketpair this year made probably hundreds of millions of dollars in revenue, and also hundreds of millions dollars in profit. Because Pocketpair is a Japanese team the salaries are not as high as in the US. It’s a small team. This is not a AAA game and it’s not a very expensive game.

So I think that the profit margin is probably sky high for Palworld and I think that Nintendo didn’t like that one bit and said, look, they’re basically stealing our character designs. We cannot do anything about this. So let’s screw them with other things, like, again, patents that are very, very technical. The patents are not listed yet, so we don’t know which patents. We don’t know which patents Nintendo is actually talking about, but I bet with you already today that it’s going to be highly, highly technical things, like this confirmation screen that I mentioned and stuff like that.

After settling the lawsuit with Nintendo, White Cat Project is still in active development in Japan, celebrating its 10th anniversary this year with over 5 million downloads. Should Nintendo win its lawsuit against Palworld, it is likely that we will see a similar outcome where Pocketpair is allowed to continue its work on the game, albeit while feeding Nintendo a slice of the profits.

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