Speaking about the development and release of Palworld during a panel at Game Developer’s Conference, Pocketpair communications director and publishing manager John Buckley spoke the issues faced by the studio after Palworld‘s early 2024 launch.
Buckley spoke about a lawsuit Pocketpair is facing against another company since September. Referring to the event as something that “didn’t feel very good,” Buckley mentions that he can’t go into too many details about the lawsuit since it is still an active one. However, he does say that the company was shocked at the lawsuit, which was surrounding patent infringement (transcription via GamesRadar).
“The last thing that happened that didn’t feel very good […] is a little thing that happened in September,” Buckley said. “Very tiny even, you probably haven’t heard about it. A fellow indie company decided to come for us. 100% transparency here, this is an active lawsuit, so genuinely, I can’t talk about it or I’ll get wrapped up in the whole thing. But this obviously came as a shock to us. I think it came as a shock to a lot of people because it’s alleged patent infringement, which is something that no one even considered, and it’s something that we’re still hashing out basically.”
Buckley mentioned that the studio’s surprise at being sued for patent infringement came as a surprise because Pocketpair had done the prerequisite legal checks for Palworld leading up to its release. The game was supposed to be legally cleared for release in Japan.
“It didn’t feel good, obviously. We were pretty vocal before Palworld released that we did legal checks before the game released, and they were all cleared – in Japan,” said Buckley. “So obviously, when the lawsuit was announced, we were all like, ‘What?'”
“And we went back to the lawyers, and the lawyers contacted the courts, and they said, ‘what’s going on,’ and that’s when we discovered it was patents that they were going for. Pretty much everyone at Pocketpair is a huge fan, so a pretty depressing day, a lot of people kind of head-down walking home in the rain. It changed a lot of things for us. We were just about to release the PlayStation version. We were just about to go to Tokyo Game Show. Obviously, we had to kind of scale back a little bit and hire security guards and stuff like that. But yeah, the short answer is it did not feel good.”
The lawsuit that Buckley referred to was one led by Nintendo and The Pokémon Company. Filed back in September, the lawsuit revolves around a patent infringement, with Nintendo seeking injunction and compensation from Pocketpair. As part of its lawsuit, Nintendo’s statement said that Pocketpair’s Palworld infringes “multiple patent rights.”
During this same panel, Buckley also spoke about the success of Palworld, and how it came as a surprise to the developers. He also spoke about the game’s tremendous launch, and how the developers only got to celebrate for around 20 minutes before having to get back to work to try and fix the various networking and server-related bugs that players were experiencing.
