Who’s ready to capture some Pokémon-looking creatures and force them into labor camps to manufacture assault rifles? As announced in the new State of Play, PlayStation 5 players can now join in the Palworld fun with a port out on Sony’s platform just a week after maker Pocketpair was sued by Nintendo for alleged patent infringement.
The survival crafting sim exploded in popularity on PC via Steam and Xbox Series X/S via Game Pass at the start of 2024 despite only being in Early Access. Players fight whimsical creatures and capture them to help build bases and take on tougher monsters with multiplayer raids reminiscent of what you might find in an MMO.
While the millions of concurrent players it had at launch have since moved on, Palworld continues to be a force to be reckoned with in the multiplayer live-service space, such that Nintendo decided to finally sue the Pokémon-inspired game eight months later, citing patent infringement.
“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 wrote in a statement at the time. “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,” responded Pocketpair in its own statement. “It is truly unfortunate that we will be forced to allocate significant time to matters unrelated to game development due to this lawsuit.”
Experts have weighed in on the dispute, suggesting that Nintendo wouldn’t bring a lawsuit against the indie developer unless it felt it had a very strong case. They cited a very specific and highly technical patent around throwing a spherical object to capture a creature that could be one of the things at issue in the lawsuit, though Nintendo hasn’t yet said what exact parts of Palworld infringe on its IP. It’s still unclear what impact that lawsuit could have on the game or its existence on rival platforms.
