This was the object that set off alarm bells at Nintendo to attack Palworld: This patent approved in August prevents other projects from using mechanics to capture creatures

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Since the first presentation of Palworld, comments about its clear inspirations were not long in coming. Being a survival title in an open world with a cartoon style and adorable creatures that you can capture and use as support in multiple situations, it was clear that the big N would look for any small element of the project to be able to remove this obstacle from the way. Although at first it seemed that everything would be fine with Palworld, A Japanese lawyer has shared the object that set off alarm bells at Nintendo to take legal action against Palworld.

On September 18, 2024, it was announced that Nintendo and The Pokémon Company filed a lawsuit for infringement of multiple patents against PocketPair and its best-selling title: Palworld. Until now, it was not known exactly which patents had been infringed, but Lawyer Kiyoshi Kurihara has shed light on the dark sea of ​​doubts in which the players found ourselves.

The Pal Sphere has a great resemblance to the Poké Ball, so much so that it was the object that set off alarms at Nintendo to go against Palworld

According to Kurihara's statements in an interview for Automaton, it is possible that Nintendo acted due to the recent approval of patent 7545191which was proposed in July 2024 and recently approved in August of the same year. It seems that this strict patent greatly limits all those developers who wish to implement mechanics inspired by Pokémon, more precisely in Capturing creatures using an object that is thrown and hits the targetto then be collected or obtained by the player to make use of said creature in other activities such as combat.

As we can see, the lines drawn by Nintendo make it very clear that they do not want to see another monster capture system similar to what was seen in Pokémon on the market. Although this may not be the only patent that Nintendo has focused on to sue, since They have claimed for a series of 28 patentsamong which is the family of patents where the code comes from 7545191.

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For its part, PocketPair has already issued a statement on the matter, but there are still many questions in the air. It is true that the capture of creatures through a throwing object is now a patent of The Pokemon Company, but it was approved in August, while Palworld was launched in early 2024, so said patent would not be valid in this case. However, we are talking about Nintendo, a company that has managed to successfully fight hundreds of cases that directly and indirectly affected its intellectual property.