Last year, Nintendo filed a lawsuit in Japan against Palworld developer Pocketpair, alleging that their game had violated several of Nintendo’s patents.

During this year’s GDC, Palworld global community manager John Buckley recalled the fateful day when they heard about the suit. Buckly recounts that “it didn’t feel good obviously”, and that it was a “very depressing day” as many of the game’s developers were huge fans of Pokemon. He also remarked that it changed a lot of things for the company, and that they had to scale back their presence at the Tokyo Game Show and hire extra security, presumably out of concern for potential backlash from fans.

“We did legal checks before Palworld released and they were all cleared in Japan so obviously 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.”

“Pretty much everyone at Pocketpair is a huge fan, so it was a very depressing day, everyone heads down and walking in the rain. It changed a lot of things for us. We were just about to release the PlayStation version, we were just about to go to Tokyo Game Show, so obviously we had to scale back a little bit and hire security guards and stuff like that.”

At the time of this writing, we have yet to receive any further updates on how the lawsuit itself is progressing. Stay tuned for more as it comes.

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