Mario Bautista
Palworld has been one of 2024’s most talked-about games, and Nintendo’s latest lawsuit has only boosted its notoriety. Despite developer Pocketpair’s ongoing litigation with one of the industry’s most well-equipped companies, they remain undeterred in bringing the experience to new platforms.
Palworld will officially be making the jump to mobile devices sometime in the near future. Developers PocketPair and PUBG publisher Krafton Inc. have announced a new licensing agreement, bringing the controversial monster-catching game to mobile platforms. Krafton Inc. makes sense as a mobile partner after Fortnite cannibalized PUBG’s market share on PC, the progenitor battle royale found a healthy and dedicated audience on mobile devices despite Fortnite appearing on those platforms too. Recently, Krafton made headlines when they saved Tango Gameworks from obscurity after Microsoft closed the studio in their start-of-the-year cost-cutting rounds.
PocketPair is Continuing to Expand Despite Murky Future
It appears that despite the lawsuit and murky future of Palworld, PocketPair remains undeterred regarding the game’s expansion. On September 18th, Nintendo and the Pokémon Company filed a lawsuit in the Tokyo District Court alleging copyright infringement against Palworld developers PocketPair. PocketPair’s Global Community Manager recently conveyed that the lawsuit will not affect PocketPair’s plans, saying, “We refuse for any plans to be changed. We march on,”. And marched on they have; aside from this announcement, Palworld has recently released on the PlayStation 5 in every region except for Japan. While no concrete reason was given, one can assume it’s due to the precarious legal situation in their home country. It should be noted that Buckley mentioned that Palworld had more active players in Japan than in any other region except for China.
Krafton Inc., for their part, has stated that the PUBG team is striving to “faithfully reinterpret and implement the original’s fun elements to fit the mobile environment.” This is certainly a gamble for the publishing house, and only time will tell if their bet on the controversial upstart will pay off. Industry experts are divided on the likely outcome of this lawsuit, but many analysts seem to be signaling that PocketPair’s chances of winning remain slim. If the lawsuit turns out in Nintendo’s favor, PocketPair will most likely have to pay out compensatory damages. However, if the game were to emerge victorious, it will almost certainly have to go through a retooling and overhaul which will affect Krafton’s mobile port, leading to delays.
Since the filing of the lawsuit, new information has come to light that only complicates the case even further. Nintendo, a notoriously litigious company, began its investigation into Palworld in January but only filed the lawsuit once concrete details of the game’s move to the PS5 became well known. In the intervening months since Palworld’s release, Nintendo filed a few eyebrow-raising patents for very broad mechanics utilized by many other games, such as capturing a monster in a 3D virtual space. At the other end of the spectrum, a former PocketPair employee posted a thread on X in which they claimed that the CEO of PocketPair acted in a way that encouraged employees to make Pal designs look like popular Pokémon. Litigations usually take a while, so there may not be a resolution for a while but the case is shaping up to be a landmark lawsuit for video game copyright and patent laws.
Source: Gamerant
