Nintendo has been working its legal team overtime in a desperate attempt to stop Pocketpair’s Palworld in its tracks. It’s not going well.

Nintendo’s long campaign to protect its Pokémon empire just ran into serious headwinds. The company has been trying to claim ownership of certain gameplay mechanics — like summoning creatures to fight on your behalf — in its ongoing legal battle with Palworld developer Pocketpair. But both the U.S. and Japanese patent offices are now pushing back, casting doubt on whether Nintendo’s ideas were ever truly unique.

The fight centers on Nintendo’s argument that Pocketpair’s hit game Palworld borrows too heavily from Pokémon. That’s not a new complaint — fans have been calling Palworld “Pokémon with guns” since its release. What’s new is the claim that Nintendo actually owns patents on the mechanics behind capturing and commanding creatures.

Ru-roh, Raggie.

Those patents are now being re-examined on both sides of the Pacific.

The Patent That Couldn’t Catch ‘Em All

Nintendo’s key patent describes gameplay where a character can “summon another entity to battle on their behalf.” On paper, that sounds a lot like Pokémon’s decades-old monster battle system — but it also describes dozens of other games that have come before and since.

The Japan Patent Office recently rejected one of Nintendo’s related applications outright, citing ARK: Survival Evolved, Monster Hunter 4, Craftopia, and even Pokémon GO itself as examples of prior art — proof that these ideas weren’t original when Nintendo filed. This patent is about capturing creatures and making them fight for you, and oh, yeah, there’s plenty of prior art on that one. This is a bit too bad for Nintendo, because that essentially describes the whole concept behind Pokémon.

Meanwhile, in the United States, the head of the Patent and Trademark Office has ordered a full re-examination of Nintendo’s “summon and fight” patent, after independent reviewers raised similar concerns. That’s not something that happens often, and it’s rarely good news for the patent holder.

The three patents Nintendo is trying to claim are:

• 7545191 essentially describes Pokeball-style catching mechanics, wherein you aim and throw a capture item in order to make a creature your own.
• Also related to capture mechanics is number 7493117, describes an in-game indicator that shows you how likely a capture is to be successful before you actually throw the capture item.
• The third patent, 7528390 describes mechanics related to boarding and riding characters, the sort of thing present in Pokemon Legends: Arceus with the likes of Ride Pokemon Braviary and Basculegion, not to mention a host of other games such as Wizard 101, and No Man’s Sky.

The “Mods Don’t Count” Controversy

One of the stranger turns in this story came from Nintendo’s lawyers, who argued in Japanese court that mods — fan-made modifications to existing games — shouldn’t be considered valid prior art because they can’t function without the base game.

Pocketpair’s team had pointed to mods that added Pokémon-style summoning mechanics to games like Dark Souls III, suggesting that the concept had already been done before. Nintendo’s claim that “mods don’t count” drew immediate criticism from intellectual-property experts, who warned that if courts accepted that reasoning, it could undermine decades of legal precedent and weaken the protections modders rely on.

In short: Nintendo tried to exclude a whole category of creative work from the record, and neither the U.S. nor Japanese patent offices seem willing to play along.

Rewriting the Rules Mid-Battle

Adding to the drama, Nintendo has been quietly amending its patent language while litigation is ongoing — a rare and risky move. In one case, the company added oddly specific phrases about riding non-flying mounts “in the air,” seemingly to differentiate its claims from other games that let players switch between ground and flying creatures.

To legal observers, that looks less like confidence and more like damage control.

Why It Matters

If Nintendo’s argument were to succeed, it could set a troubling precedent for game design. Mechanics like creature capture, summoning allies, or swapping mounts are now common across genres — from Final Fantasy to ARK to Palworld itself. Treating those as proprietary inventions would put nearly every monster-taming or open-world survival game at risk.

It would also strike a blow against modders, whose creations often blur the line between fan art and innovation. The idea that mods “don’t count” because they depend on a base game is a narrow reading of creativity — one that doesn’t hold up well in a digital age built on remixing and reimagining.

The Broader Picture

For now, both patent offices have refused to accept Nintendo’s narrowing definition of what counts as “new.” The rejections and re-examinations leave Nintendo’s legal footing shaky at best, and they strengthen Pocketpair’s defense that Palworld’s mechanics are part of a long, shared lineage of creature-based games.

Nintendo’s courtroom tactics may have backfired. Instead of reinforcing the company’s dominance, they’ve sparked a global conversation about creativity, ownership, and how far intellectual property should reach in interactive media. There is a large contingent in the game development world that holds the opinion that gameplay elements ought not to be patentable.

The Michigan Technology Law Review is one such voice, holding that such patents limit or eliminate the development of work-alike games. People seek out games that work similarly to ones they already like. Gameplay patents break this by forbidding parallel development. A game company that files such patents effectively limits its own product’s future by cancelling out the possibility of referral purchases by players who are looking for similar games.

For indie developers — and for anyone who loves the strange, imaginative worlds of sci-fi and fantasy gaming — that’s a fight worth watching.