Nintendo Lawsuit Against Pocketpair

Nintendo are infamous for waiting until games or projects, even free fan games, are finished or close to finished before hitting the creators with cease and desist letters and lawsuits.

In the case of non-profit fan games, I would speculate that it is a calculated PR move. Most passion projects, particularly those involving teams of programmers and artists, tend to fall apart during the months or years of development, and never actually release anything. By letting these projects die naturally, Nintendo can avoid appearing too strict or oppressive when it comes to enforcing their own IP rights and upsetting their own fans.

Unfortunately when it comes to projects that do succeed and release a finished product, Nintendo then seem to be compelled to put their foot down and shut down the project.

After all the time, effort and in many cases money has been invested voluntarily by their own fans into a non-profit fan project, this does often spark a lot of ire in the community.

One somewhat recent example I can think of is AM2R, a remake of Metroid 2 that had the poor fortune to release just before Nintendo's own 3DS remaster of the game. The creator put the game out after years of development only to immediately receive a C&D letter.

Of course, the game was already out in the wild and you can find it of you know where to look, so it wasn't a complete waste. But it might have been nice if Nintendo had been open about their intent and shut the project down before all the work had been done.

In the case of Palworld, however, it is a for-profit product and it is not overtly attempting to portray Nintendo IP directly as a fan game would, which complicates matters.

There are a few possibilities I can imagine for the delay. It may be due to one, several or all of these. Or something else entirely.

The first I can think of is that their lawyers could not find enough evidence of IP infringement until this point. They may have initially attempted to build a copyright infringement case, found it too hard to prove and only recently discovered the patent infringement.

Another possibility is that they needed to wait for confirmation or accumulation of evidence of the patent case, and intended to file this lawsuit all along.

It is also possible that they were waiting for Pocketpair to accure enough profit and market share to make it worth Nintendo's while to make a case and attempt to claim damages. In other words, they held off and let Pocketpair gather enough rope to hang themselves.

The final possibility I could understand would be concerns about the PR perception of suing Palworld.

Yes, there were sycophants screeching that Nintendo should sue them the moment the game gained notoriety because "Pokémon owns the concept of catching and training animals in video games" or other nonsense, but it is feasible that Nintendo were genuinely unsure what the public reaction would be if they were to attempt to take down a competitor at the height of its popularity.

Now the hype, media cycle and customer base has largely moved on to other things, perhaps they feel secure enough in pursuing Pocketpair without fear of invoking too much ire from Palworld fans.

Again, I am not a layer, I have no insider knowledge into the internal situation in either company, and this is all pure speculation on my part. But those would be my best guesses with regards to Nintendo's motivation.