At Long Last: Palworld 1.0 Launch Trailer

Pocketpair’s Palworld, the target of a massive 2024 lawsuit from Nintendo/The Pokémon Company, releases its launch trailer.

The game releases for Steam, Playstation and XBox on July 10.

Core Mechanics

• Survival Elements: Gather resources, craft gear, build bases, and carefully manage food and shelter against the elements and rival factions. 
• Pals: Over a hundred distinct creatures can be captured using “Pal Spheres”. They can be commanded in combat, mounted for land/sea/air traversal, or put to work automating base production, mining, and farming. team +2
• Multiplayer: Play solo or co-op with up to 4 players, or jump onto dedicated servers supporting up to 32 players for trading, battling, or guild-building. 

Platforms & Pricing

• Platforms: Steam, Xbox Series X/S, Xbox One, PlayStation 5, and macOS.
• Price: Currently $22.49 on Steam (25% off) during promotional sales. It is also included on Xbox Game Pass. 

Nintendo vs Pocketpair

Nintendo has been trying really hard to nail Pocketpair to a cross on this one. Instead of going after copyright infringement (Palworld is pretty derivative of Pokémon, that should be obvious to anyone) they decided to try their hand at patenting game mechanics and excoriating Pocketpair on that basis.

It hasn’t been going well. Pocketpair altered their gameplay mechanics so that players no longer hang directly onto the summoned Pals. That evaded some of the patent complaints. Nintendo’s patent claims to the idea of summoning creatures to battle on player’s behalf has been rejected by the U.S. Patent Office as lacking novelty. The Japan Patent Office has rejected Nintendo’s patent claim for the mechanics of operating capture balls in a gaming interface because it didn’t include “an inventive step”, or add any sort of new innovation beyond already common, established mechanics. Nintendo can amend the claim, but for right now, instead of a Pokéball, they’re holding a goose egg.

The U.S. Patent and Trademark Office rejected all 26 claims destroyed in a 104-page ruling that could reshape the Pokemon company’s legal strategy going forward. The most damaging evidence came from Nintendo’s own earlier filings from 2019 and 2020, along with patents from Konami dating back to 2002 and Bandai Namco from 2019, all describing the same gameplay mechanics that Nintendo tried to claim as a new invention in 2023.

Worse, while Nintendo did receive a patent in September of 2025 on what amounts to summoning a subcharacter and letting it fight in one of two battle modes, one automatic and the other under control of the player. This patent was overly broad, and there was plenty of prior art. So, less than two months later, the USPTO Director John A. Squires ordered an ex parte reexamination of the patent, to reevaluate whether the patent should be have been granted in the first place.

Nintendo was given two months to defend the patent and, in a bizarre move, submitted nothing, a rare move for a company whose legal team is known for aggressive IP enforcement across Nintendo Switch, Switch 2, and mobile platforms. When Nintendo didn’t respond, the USPTO blew out all 26 claims in the patent application. It didn’t help that Konami had filed a similar patent in 2002, so there’s prior art that’s more than 20 years old.

Nintendo was planning to use the USPTO’s ruling to fuel their claims in the Japanese courts, but the USPTO’s rejection changes everything. It’s not like Nintendo to step on a rake quite this large.

Nintendo hasn’t sued Pocketpair in the United States yet, and they still could. However, with the USPTO throwing out all 26 of their patent claims, they won’t have a lot upon which to move forward if they try it.