"Nintendo felt threatened" by Palworld's sales success and anime expansion, analyst says: "This lawsuit would have never happened if Palworld had 500 users per day"
Sep. 19, 2024Nintendo is" like a mafia. They will not kill you instantly. They will let you cook a little bit."
When you purchase through links on our site, we may earn an affiliate commission.Here’s how it works.
Nintendo’s decision to file a patent infringement lawsuit against Palworld developer Pocketpair would probably “have never happened” to a smaller game, according to one analyst.
Speaking to GamesRadar+ aboutNintendo’s Palworld lawsuit, Dr Serkan Toto says that a smaller game would likely have flown under Nintendo’s radar and thateven the company’s “feared” legal team would have left Pocketpair alone. “This lawsuit would have never happened if Palworld had 500 users per day on Steam,” Toto says. “[Nintendo] would have said, ‘ok, whatever, let’s leave these guys alone; the game will die.'”
But Palworld did not die, becoming one of the highest-played games on Steam and shifting tens of millions of sales. That success appears to be leading to aPalworld PS5 announcement at Tokyo Game Show, which is also marked out by aPalworld anime partnership with Sony’s Aniplex subsidiary. It’s that multiplatform expansion, as well as a move into the anime and merch world that makes up such a big slice of Nintendo’s pie, that is likely to have brought attention to Pocketpair.
“You cannot do this with Nintendo,” Toto says. “I understand that Nintendo was foaming at the mouth, saying, ‘Look, these guys are going multiplatform, and they’re making anime and merchandising their Pals.’ And Nintendo felt threatened or disrespected or just angry, and they dropped this bomb on them.”
“I think for Pocketpair, the challenge will be bigger. I think Nintendo will go after them in a bigger way, will ask for more damages than just 3 billion yen. My feeling is that Nintendo is a lot angrier with Pocketpair than with [Colopl]. It’s like a mafia. They will not kill you instantly. They will let you cook a little bit.”
While part of the long wait between Palworld’s release and Nintendo’s lawsuit is the former’s expansionism, Toto remarks that the other part is a desire to ensure an airtight attack. That “feared” legal team will have been working hard to remove any potential defenses from Pocketpair’s lawyers’ toolkit, and that takes time. All told, Toto thinks it’s looking like bad news for the Palworld studio, and that Nintendo will be looking to stake a claim on some of its impressive takings over the past seven months.
Sign up to the GamesRadar+ Newsletter
Weekly digests, tales from the communities you love, and more
Not everyone’s convinced by Nintendo’s angle, and one lawyer thinks the company “may be reaching.”
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.
A mysterious Palworld update appears to make a change designed to get around the survival game’s legal battle with Nintendo
Five years later, PUBG creator PlayerUnknown finally reveals his massive open-world survival game projects, aiming for “realistic worlds thousands of kilometers wide” across three games
Kraven the Hunter review: “The insistence on an R-rating helps save this, with a decent helping of bloodthirsty action”
