Patent Office Zaps Nintendo with Rare Sass Over Palworld Patent

Japan’s Patent Office rejected Nintendo’s monster-catching patent with language that attorneys describe as “rarely seen” in official rulings — and the key piece of prior art was a YouTube video from 2013. The ruling undermines Nintendo’s ongoing Palworld lawsuit and, for handheld players, removes the threat of an injunction that could have pulled Palworld from Steam Decks and Switches or forced a performance-killing redesign.

How a 2013 Fan Game Became the Smoking Gun

The Patent Office cited “Pokémon: Generations” — the 13-year-old fan game video that has since become a legal landmark — as evidence that throwing a ball to capture a monster was not an “inventive step.” Nintendo called the citation “extremely inappropriate” because the fan game allegedly infringed Nintendo’s own copyright. The Office shot back: even rephrasing the patent in generics — “a spherical object with a red upper half and a white lower half” — the rejection still held. The old video is now flooded with comments reading “You saved Palworld.” This level of judicial pushback is rare, and it signals fatigue with overbroad gaming patents that threaten independent titles across portable platforms.

Why the Ruling Protects Steam Deck and Switch Players Specifically

Nintendo’s patent covered concepts as broad as “selecting a Poke Ball displayed at the bottom right of the screen.” Had it been approved, Nintendo could have argued that Palworld’s capture mechanics infringed, potentially forcing Pocketpair to pull the game from stores or rebuild its core loop. A redesign on that scale would crater frame rates — echoing the performance issues Halo Campaign Evolved faced on Steam Deck — and increase load times on the Steam Deck’s APU and the Switch’s cloud-streaming pipeline — the two platforms where Palworld found its most dedicated portable audience. Instead, the ruling sets a precedent against weaponizing vague interface patents against independent developers. Nintendo has filed a petition that keeps the patent technically under review, but the Office’s tone and reasoning make a reversal unlikely. For handheld gamers, this is the most decisive legal win Palworld has seen, and a signal that the patent office is watching how platform holders use IP to restrict what runs on portable hardware.