In the latest chapter of Nintendo’s and The Pokémon Company’s ongoing attempts to litigate the use of Pokémon-styled gameplay mechanics, the US Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) has revoked a patent granted to the same. The patent—US 12,403,397—revolved around gameplay mechanics that involved summoning allies to fight alongside the player’s character. Initially filed in 2023 and granted in September 2025, the USPTO had ordered a re-examination in November 2025.
It is worth noting that the revocation of the patent is a non-final decision, which gives Nintendo some room to try and fight back and appeal the decision. Game Fray’s Florian Mueller has noted that it has two months to respond to the decision, and also the choice of asking for an extension.
Mueller has noted that the re-examination of the patent didn’t require the USPTO to look at any game to get to the conclusion that it was “obvious”. However, the proceedings have been made “somewhat complicated” by the USPTO not having looked at other games.
“It is all based on combinations of two or three prior art references in the form of published US patent applications,” he wrote. “Two of those earlier patents were filed by Nintendo itself, and one each by Konami and Bandai Namco.”
If Nintendo can successfully argue for 18 of the 26 patent claims, it has the opportunity to take legal action against other companies, citing that “a person having ordinary skill in the art (i.e., a game developer in this case) would not necessarily combine those different prior art references”.
It remains to be seen whether the company will decide to modify the application to make it narrower or abandon the patent application altogether. Nintendo had faced a similar issue with a patent application in Japan.
Back in November, the re-examination of US 12,403,397 was initiated by USPTO director John A. Squires, who said that he had “determined that substantial new questions of patentability have arisen,” from looking at older patents that also involved a player’s companion participating in fights alongside the player.
These patents were considered to be part of Nintendo’s larger legal strategy for dealing with Pocketpair’s monster-catching survival game Palworld. While the former has been battling the latter in Japanese courts for some time now, its filings to the USPTO have indicated a desire to curtail Palworld‘s popularity on a greater scale.
October 2025 saw another one of Nintendo’s patents—part of its ongoing legal dispute with Pocketpair—had been rejected by the Japan Patent Office (JPO). At the time, the JPO had cited prior art with games like the ARK series, Monster Hunter 4, and Pocketpair’s Craftopia already featuring “monster capture” mechanics as they were described in the patent.
At the time, Mueller had noted that the JPO’s decision, even if it weren’t non-final, wouldn’t be binding for the sake of Nintendo’s lawsuit against Pocketpair, which is being presided over by Judge Motoyuki Nakashima. Rather, it only led to the lawsuit’s delay. The rejection had also presented Nintendo with two distinct options: abandon the patent application altogether or try to appeal the rejection with a modified version of the application.
