There’s been lots of give attention to three Pokémon patents since Nintendo and The Pokémon Firm sued Palworld maker Pocketpair for alleged patent infringement, however now there is a new patent making headlines. Nintendo and The Pokémon Firm had been awarded a patent on September 2, 2025, overlaying summoning and auto-battling mechanics that, as The Verge reported on September 17, sounds rather a lot just like the system from Pokémon Scarlet and Pokémon Violet.
Haley McLean, a online game lawyer with Voyer Regulation, advised Recreation Developer U.S. Patent No. 12,403,397 is a “technique patent” that offers with the software program operations associated to the summoning and autobattling. “To boil it down, most easily, it is [when] I throw out a bit of man, and if there’s one other little man it might struggle, they struggle,'” she stated. “If there isn’t any little man there, they begin idling and transferring round a bit. If I level in a sure path, my little man can go that approach. And in the event that they encounter one thing aggro, they get right into a struggle routinely.”
There’s been lots of confusion on-line concerning the scope of the patent—how might Nintendo and The Pokémon Firm patent summoning creatures into battle?—and the way it impacts the broader online game trade. What’s essential concerning the patent is that it is not merely patenting summoning a creature into battle; for a recreation to be infringing, it must mimic the entire system, not simply part of it. Nonetheless, there’s an anxiousness to all of it: Might Nintendo and The Pokémon Firm come after different video games with comparable mechanics, because it has with Palworld?
René Otto, online game lawyer and Deviant Authorized founder, advised Recreation Developer the patent does not essentially imply Nintendo and The Pokémon Firm now have a “monopoly on creature capturing and taming,” and even auto-battling. “As a substitute, Nintendo has the unique proper to make use of the mix of mechanics as described within the awarded patent for so long as the patent is deemed legitimate,” he stated.
One other query is whether or not or not the patent is legitimate—or, slightly, whether or not it will maintain up if challenged? The patent has already been awarded, and there isn’t any undoing that and not using a authorized problem, which is unlikely, McLean stated; it is costly in each time and cash to problem a patent. However there’s nonetheless debate as as to whether it will maintain up if challenged, centered across the concept of whether or not the patent covers an concept or not. You possibly can’t patent concepts, McLean famous. “There’s a lot case legislation making an attempt to determine whether or not a patent is an concept,” she stated.
“Nintendo and different giant corporations have excellent attorneys who’re excellent at drafting concepts to sound like software program.”
Patenting software program makes issues sophisticated. “It’s totally simple to speak about an concept that occurs on software program and make it sound just like the software program is new and helpful and non-obvious,” McLean continued.
“However for those who boil away all of the software program language, what the [United States Patent and Trademark Office] needs to be doing is saying, ‘Is that this an concept that occurs on software program, or is that this software program that executes an concept to the purpose that the software program is the factor that is distinctive, non-obvious.’ It will get very muddled, and Nintendo and different giant corporations have excellent attorneys who’re excellent at drafting concepts to sound like software program.”
You possibly can see this in how the software program processing is referenced within the patent: Nintendo and The Pokémon Firm have filed the patent as relating “to a storage medium, an info processing system, an info processing equipment, and a recreation processing technique for executing a recreation through which a plurality of characters battle with one another.”
So, ought to recreation builders be anxious?
McLean stated the difficulty at hand is not essentially this one patent. There are a whole bunch of different patents— belonging to corporations apart from Nintendo—that exist on this complicated house. “We’ll get to some extent the place builders are going to need to learn about a whole bunch of patents to know if their particular methods—not simply summoning, however tons of different issues which can be in video games,” she stated.
The United States Patent and Trademark Workplace (USPTO) is behind on video games, McLean stated. It is actually laborious for an examiner to evaluate whether or not one thing has been achieved earlier than, or solves a brand new downside , or is nonobvious generally as a result of video video games are lengthy. There are lots of them, they usually’re not all the time simple to entry—particularly older ones.
Nintendo supplied the patent examiner a hyperlink to its personal web site as a reference, McLean stated. The USPTO publishes the references cited and patents searched (through Gamesfray, so the general public can see what the examiner checked out. With Nintendo and The Pokémon Firm’s new patent, the examiner checked out different patents, however does not seem to have checked out different video games.
And there isn’t any simple reply for this challenge below the USPTO. Huge corporations might be able to tackle patents they suppose are invalid, however impartial builders or smaller studios and not using a ton of capital merely will not have the ability to tackle that struggle.
Firms, like Nintendo, have proven that they are prepared to implement their patents. The corporate is at present suing Palworld developer Pocketpair over three patents associated to catching creatures, aiming the ball one throws at stated creatures, and driving on them.
It is not that patents are inherently unhealthy, based on McLean. They’re meant to reward innovation, not hinder it. However the system can create an atmosphere of hysteria round infringing, even when it is unlikely. Otto stated that patent descriptions may be “summary and imprecise.”
“It casts this large shroud of hysteria that is possibly OK for the large boys, for the triple-A studios which have sufficient attorneys on their workforce to evaluate these items always, however for the little indie devs, it simply does not make sense for the trade on this approach,” McLean added.
