Palworld, a video game mocked as “Pokémon with guns,” became one of the most popular games in the world when it was released in January.
Nintendo and the Pokémon Company on Wednesday filed a patent infringement lawsuit against the video game company that developed Palword, a game with cute creatures that resemble the characters in Pokémon, except they use military-grade weapons.
Palworld became one of the most popular games in the world when it was released in January. It had been promoted for three years before that, and the trailers for it inspired memes and other forms of mocking by people who thought the game looked like an apocalyptic version of Pokémon.
Palworld’s makers have repeatedly draw distinctions between Palworld, which is a survival game, and Pokémon, where players collect monsters and battle.
On Thursday, the Pokémon Company and Nintendo, a joint owner of the Pokémon Company, said in a statement that the companies had filed a suit in Tokyo District Court against the maker of Palworld, Pocketpair. The suit accuses Palword of violating “multiple patent rights” and seeks compensation for damages, according to the statement.
Pocketpair, which is based in Tokyo, said in a statement on Thursday that it did not know the details of the companies’ claims. “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 said.
Pocketpair said that the success of Palword had been a surprise and that the company would continue doing work to improve the game.
“It is truly unfortunate that we will be forced to allocate significant time to matters unrelated to game development due to this lawsuit,” the statement said.
In January, the Pokémon Company said it was investigating claims that a new game had similarities to Pokémon, but it did not name Palworld, which had been released days earlier in an early access period. More than 300,000 players simultaneously logged on to the game on the release day.
That month, Takuro Mizobe, the chief executive of Pocketpair, told the gaming website Automaton that the game had cleared legal reviews. Mizobe said: “We make our games very seriously, and we have absolutely no intention of infringing upon the intellectual property of other companies.”
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