Nintendo and The Pokemon Company announced that they have filed a patent infringement lawsuit against Pocketpair, the creators of the game heavily inspired by Pokemon. pal world. The Tokyo District Court suit seeks an injunction and compensation “on the basis that pal world infringes multiple patent rights,” according to the announcement.
“Nintendo will continue to take necessary action 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 writes.
The many superficial similarities between Pokémon and pal world are easily evident, even though Pocketpair's game adds many new features over Nintendo's (like, uh, weapons). But legally taking advantage of even very important commonalities between games can be an uphill battle. This is because copyright law (at least in the US) generally does not apply to the mere design elements of a game and only extends to “expressive elements” such as art, design of characters and music.
Generally, even blatant copies of successful games can make enough changes to those “expressive” parts to avoid legal problems. But pal world could clear the high legal bar for infringement if the game's 3D character models were almost entirely removed from the real thing. Pokémon game files, as some observers have been alleging since January.
What patent are we talking about?
However, beyond mere copyright concerns, Nintendo's lawsuit announcement specifically alleges patent infringement by pal world (although this difference could be due to vagaries of the translation from the original Japanese). A patent lawsuit would apparently require some unique game mechanic or feature that the patent office has specifically granted stronger protections to. While the Pokémon Company holds several (US) patents, most of them seem to have to do with various server communication methods or Pokémon Sleep's sleep monitoring capabilities.