"I think this will end bad for Pocketpair": Analyst says Nintendo's "feared" legal team wouldn't sue Palworld unless it was confident of victory
Sep. 19, 2024Nintendo wants Pocketpair’s cash, and “as much of it as possible”
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Nintendo wouldn’t sue Palworld unless it was pretty sure it could win a hefty chunk of the survival game’s “hundreds of millions” of revenue, says one industry analyst who knows just how scary the Nintendo legal team is.
Speaking to GamesRadar+ aboutNintendo’s Palworld lawsuit, analyst Serkan Toto points out that “Nintendo is famously protective of its IP, and they have a very, very strong legal team that is feared in the Japanese gaming industry. You don’t want to make Nintendo angry.” That team’s strength is part of why it’s taken so long for this lawsuit to rear its head. It’s been seven months sincePalworldlaunched, and Toto posits that in that time, “Nintendo wanted to be absolutely thorough. They didn’t want to shoot from the hip.”
“[They wanted to] make absolutely sure that everything is mapped out, that they have counter-arguments against anything that Pocketpair will say in court, and only if they are able to build a really strong case where they think they are going to win, they will file the lawsuit. And I think that Nintendo is going into this lawsuit thinking that they’re going to win. And I fear, looking at the track record, it’s highly likely that they win.”
Toto claims he “cannot really remember a single lawsuit that Nintendo itself initiated in Japan that they lost. I think they won every single one of them.” While there’s a first time for everything, he also thinks that “this will end bad for Pocketpair,” and that Nintendo will be coming for as much money as possible from the company.
While Toto believes Nintendo’s certain of victory,other experts think “Nintendo may be reaching” in its Palworld lawsuit.
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I’m GamesRadar’s news editor, working with the team to deliver breaking news from across the industry. I started my journalistic career while getting my degree in English Literature at the University of Warwick, where I also worked as Games Editor on the student newspaper, The Boar. Since then, I’ve run the news sections at PCGamesN and Kotaku UK, and also regularly contributed to PC Gamer. As you might be able to tell, PC is my platform of choice, so you can regularly find me playing League of Legends or Steam’s latest indie hit.
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