Nintendo and The Pokémon Company are suing the creators of Palword, a viral “Pokémon with guns” computer game.
Palworld immediately got the label “Pokémon with guns” after its first trailer debuted in 2021.
The Pokémon Company announced shortly after the game’s release in January of this year that it would investigate the copycat charges.
Pocketpair Inc., the developer of Palworld, confirmed the lawsuit in a statement on Thursday and apologised to fans for “any worry or discomfort” it caused.
Nintendo said that the action against Pocketpair was filed on September 18 in Tokyo District Court.
The action seeks an injunction against the claimed infringement as well as damages “on the grounds that ‘Palworld,’ a game developed and released by the Defendant, infringes multiple patent rights,” according to Nintendo.
“Nintendo will continue to take necessary actions against any infringement of its intellectual property rights including the Nintendo brand itself, to protect the intellectual properties it has worked hard to establish over the years,” the company said in a statement Thursday.
In response, the game maker at the centre of the lawsuit published a statement early this morning, stating that it does not know whose patents it violated.
“At this moment, we are unaware of the specific patents we are accused of infringing upon, and we have not been notified of such details,” the statement read.
Palworld has become a huge success, with over 25 million players within a month of its release.
It, like the popular video game franchise Pokémon, is about collecting strange creatures with various abilities.
According to the Pocketpair website, the game effortlessly integrates “elements of battle, monster-capturing, training, and base building.”
We earlier reported that Polish billionaire Rafal Brzoska and his wife are intending to sue Meta for running bogus adverts on Facebook and Instagram carrying false information about them.