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GRTV News - Palworld's creator is being sued by The Pokémon Company and Nintendo
Pocketpair is facing a lawsuit for so-called patent infringement.
Audio transcription
"Hello everyone and welcome back to another episode of GRTV News. Today we have, to be honest, a story that I thought we were going to be talking about earlier in this year, but it's gotten all the way to this point and now Nintendo, as we kind of expected, and the Gator Pokemon Company, have finally decided that it's time to sort of put their foot on the throat of Pocket Pair, the developer of POW World. Pocket Pair's game, POW World, it has a lot of similarities to Pokemon in regards to the design of the various creatures in it, and in the past we've seen other titles that have similar sort of design choices very quickly become the subject of a lawsuit or a patent infringement or something like that, and usually because of the weight and the financial power that Nintendo and the Pokemon Company has, it usually means that that project gets shut down rather quickly. Again, POW World came out in early access in January and now we're in September and it's finally facing some sort of legal challenges, shall we say. So let's take a look at what's happening in particular here. So Nintendo are suing the POW World developer for multiple patent infringements."
"Nintendo will continue to take necessary actions against any infringement of its intellectual property rights, including the Nintendo brand itself. So when POW World was released earlier this year, many people referred to it as Pokemon with guns, and comparisons swirled online with people noting how several POWs seem to be more than a little reminiscent of Pokemon."
"But Nintendo, who are prone to suing over the smallest things, did nothing about it and the discussion fizzled out, with developer Pocket Pair confirming that Nintendo didn't even contact them. But now the Japanese giant is letting it be known that it's time to take the gloves off. Via their website, Nintendo writes that they filed a lawsuit against POW World on Wednesday. The lawsuit seeks an injunction against infringement and compensation for damages on the grounds that POW World, again developed and released by the dependent, infringes multiple patent rights. Nintendo will continue to take necessary actions against 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.
So we'll probably come back to this story several times, but at least the ball is rolling now. How and if this affects Pocket Pair and POW World remains to be seen.
So yes, Pocket Pair is facing some legal repercussions for the creation of POW World. The interesting thing here is that, yeah, it's Nintendo that's actually filing the lawsuit. Because the Pokemon company and Nintendo are two very different entities. They just happen to work hand in hand and a lot of Pokemon games tend to launch exclusively on Nintendo platforms. But the Pokemon company is its own sort of thing and the Pokemon company is absolutely enormous."
"Pokemon brand I think is the biggest sort of franchise out there. I don't think there's any franchise that is bigger than Pokemon. But yeah, this lawsuit that has been filed and publicly, well made public on the Nintendo website, does come as well from the Pokemon company. So Nintendo and the Pokemon company are both putting their entire weight behind this lawsuit against POW World and the developer Pocket Pair. Again, they're looking here and stating that it's to do with copyright patent infringement, which basically is looking at the design choices that's made in the game. Obviously POW World and Pokemon, they play very differently in regards to the fact that POW World is sort of like a survival game."
"Yes, it has monster catching elements and the Pokemon company, Nintendo, can't necessarily stop people from using monster catching mechanics because it's a gameplay mechanic. They can't necessarily control that. But what they can do is they can say that your creatures look exactly the same as ours and they have very similar designs and if you go to the code they look exactly similar. We saw this before. When POW World came out in January, there were a lot of stories that were saying, look, this is the design of a Pokemon. A digital design. You pull back all the skin and you look at the anatomical structure of the Pokemon and go, this is the POW World one and they're almost hand in hand the same. So this is kind of what I think Nintendo and the Pokemon company are going to base their lawsuit on. What we tend to find as well with lawsuits is that the bigger fish tends to win. Again, the Pokemon company, Nintendo, are significantly larger than POW World and Pocket Pair. So unless some sort of corporate protector almost comes in to help POW World, we've seen that they're quite closely situated with Xbox. So unless someone comes in and helps them in this situation, I would imagine that they're going to struggle to defend their rights here. Unless they can prove a very, very clear argument that no, they didn't use anything and there's no patent infringement here. Either way though, this is something we're going to hear a lot about now, because this is a very high-profile lawsuit that's been issued against Pocket Pair here."
"I don't think we'll see anything of significance for a few weeks, maybe a few months, but eventually there'll be a big story coming out about it. Worst case scenario, it could see POW World entirely shut down. Best case scenario, it could probably see nothing happen at all. So we'll have to just see and stay tuned for more information. But otherwise, yeah, the main thing to take from it is that Pocket Pair, the developer of POW World, is being sued by Nintendo and the Pokemon company for infringement of patent rights in regards to the sort of designs that it uses in-game. So yeah, thank you for watching today's episode of GRTV News. I'll be back now tomorrow for the next one of the week. So until then, I hope you enjoy your Thursday and I'll see you all on the next one. Take care, everyone."
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