Which company was sued by Nintendo and The Pokémon Company over Palworld? The answer is Pocketpair.
Pocketpair is the Japanese game developer and publisher behind Palworld. On September 19, 2024, Nintendo and The Pokémon Company announced that they had filed a patent-infringement lawsuit against Pocketpair in the Tokyo District Court. The complaint sought an injunction and damages, alleging that Palworld infringed multiple patent rights.
The dispute is often described casually as a copyright or character-design lawsuit because Palworld’s creature-collection premise invited comparisons with Pokémon. The announced case, however, concerned patents. That distinction matters: patents protect inventions and processes, while copyright and trademarks cover different kinds of intellectual property.
Pocketpair is not the same company as Game Freak, which develops Pokémon games, or Nintendo itself. Crafton and NetEase are also unrelated distractors. Pocketpair developed Palworld, whose early-access launch in January 2024 made the studio internationally prominent before the legal conflict began.