In November 2024, the developers of Palworld — a scrappy indie survival game that had sold 15 million copies in its first month — confirmed something that should trouble every game developer on the planet. Nintendo was suing them over three patents. Not over character designs. Not over stolen code. Over throwing a ball to catch a creature, summoning a captured creature to fight, and riding a flying mount. Mechanics that have existed in dozens of games for decades. And every single one of those patents was filed after Palworld was already on the market.
Today we’re going to talk about whether you can actually patent a video game mechanic, why the answer is more complicated than you think, and how Nintendo’s war against Palworld may be the case that forces the system to finally reckon with the consequences.
The Law
Under 35 U.S.C. § 101, you can patent any “new and useful process, machine, manufacture, or composition of matter.” But the Supreme Court has carved out exceptions for abstract ideas, laws of nature, and natural phenomena. In Alice Corp. v. CLS Bank (2014), the Court established a two-step test: first, is the claim directed to an abstract idea? If so, does it contain an “inventive concept” that transforms it into something patent-eligible?
The Federal Circuit has applied this test to games directly. In In re Smith (2016), it held that rules for a Blackjack variation were an abstract idea — a “fundamental economic practice.” In In re Guldenaar (2018), same result for dice games. Judge Mayer wrote in concurrence that games “can never qualify as patent eligible subject matter because they endeavor to influence human behavior rather than effect technological change.” That’s a strong statement. But it’s not the whole story.
In McRO, Inc. v. Bandai Namco (2016), the Federal Circuit found that a lip-sync animation patent was eligible because it claimed a specific technical process for evaluating phoneme sub-sequences — not the abstract idea of “using rules” but a concrete method that improved how computers handled a particular problem. That distinction — abstract game rule versus specific technical implementation — is the line that every game mechanic patent lives or dies on.
The Hidden Cost of Patents That Are Never Litigated
Patents have been granted on game mechanics for decades, and some of them have had enormous consequences. Namco held U.S. Patent No. 5,718,632 on loading screen mini-games from 1998 to 2015. For twenty years, the entire industry avoided putting playable content on loading screens — not because Namco sued anyone, but because the patent existed. When it finally expired, developers held a celebratory game jam. By then, SSDs had made the whole concept nearly obsolete. That’s twenty years of player experience sacrificed to a patent that probably should never have been granted, given that a Commodore 64 game called “Invade-a-Load” did the same thing in 1987.
Sega patented the directional arrow in Crazy Taxi and sued Fox Interactive over The Simpsons: Road Rage. That case settled for undisclosed terms. Warner Bros. patented the Nemesis System from Shadow of Mordor — patent number 10,926,179, granted in 2021 after six rejections over five years. That patent blocks anyone from implementing a similar procedural enemy hierarchy system until 2036. Warner Bros. has never enforced it, never sued anyone over it. Monolith Productions was shut down. The Wonder Woman game that would have used the system was cancelled. But the patent persists, and no other developer will touch the idea.
That’s the hidden cost. The patents that do the most damage are often the ones that are never litigated. Their mere existence creates what economists call a “shadow of the patent” — a zone of creative paralysis where developers avoid entire design spaces out of fear.
The Nintendo-Palworld Timeline
The three Japanese patents Nintendo is asserting — No. 7545191, 7493117, and 7528390 — cover throwing a capture item at a creature, deploying a captured creature to fight, and mounting a flying creature mid-air. They were all filed in 2024, months after Palworld launched. But here’s the legal wrinkle: they’re divisional applications derived from parent applications filed on December 22, 2021. Under patent law, divisionals can claim the priority date of their parent — meaning Nintendo argues these patents effectively predate Palworld.
But that December 2021 date is itself interesting. Palworld was announced in June 2021. Pocketpair’s earlier game Craftopia was already public. So the timeline looks like this: Pocketpair announces a creature-catching survival game, Nintendo files patent applications six months later, Palworld launches to massive success, and Nintendo files divisional applications with claims tailored to cover Palworld’s specific mechanics. The fastest one went from filing to registration in 28 days.
Is that legal? Technically, yes. Is it using the patent system to protect genuine innovation? That’s harder to argue.
The Coercive Power of Patent Litigation
Pocketpair was forced to respond before any court ruled on anything. In November 2024, they stripped the throw-to-summon mechanic from Palworld — Pals now just appear beside the player instead of being thrown from spheres. In May 2025, they removed creature gliding, replacing it with a generic glider item. In their own words: “these changes were indeed a result of the ongoing litigation.” They called the modifications “disappointing” but “necessary.”
That’s the coercive power of patent litigation. The threat of an injunction — which could kill the game in Japan — was enough to force Pocketpair to degrade its own product. This happened before any patent was adjudicated valid or invalid.
The USPTO Pushes Back
Then the U.S. patent system pushed back. In November 2025, USPTO Director John Squires personally ordered a reexamination of U.S. Patent No. 12,403,397 — the American counterpart of the patent family at issue. This was only the second Director-initiated reexamination in over twenty years. Bloomberg Law reported that Squires was concerned about patents “crafted primarily for litigation leverage” being “used as an anticompetitive weapon.”
In March 2026, the examiner rejected all 26 claims as obvious under § 103. The prior art? Four previously published patent applications — two of which were Nintendo’s own. The examiner found that a game developer of ordinary skill would have found it obvious to combine these existing techniques. Under the Supreme Court’s KSR standard, which replaced rigid motivation-to-combine requirements with a common-sense inquiry, that’s a death sentence for patents covering well-trodden game design territory.
And that’s the fundamental problem with game mechanic patents. Game development is iterative and cumulative. Every mechanic builds on what came before. The prior art isn’t just patents — it’s published game manuals, tabletop RPG rulebooks, strategy guides, and the games themselves. At the PTAB, Activision successfully defeated a patent using nothing more than the Diablo II User Manual. Another patent fell to the Dungeons & Dragons Rulebook. When your prior art universe includes every game ever publicly released, the bar for non-obviousness becomes extraordinarily high.
Where Things Stand
The Japanese case continues in Tokyo District Court with no trial date set. Nintendo has two months to respond to the U.S. rejection. Pocketpair says its defenses are strong. Florian Mueller of Games Fray — who has tracked this dispute more closely than anyone — predicts that when all proceedings conclude, “there won’t be a single valid Nintendo patent left that Pocketpair infringes.”
Whether he’s right remains to be seen. But whatever happens in court, the damage is already done. Palworld’s players are playing a worse version of the game they paid for. And every indie developer considering a creature-catching mechanic just watched what happens when you get too successful in Nintendo’s neighborhood.
The question isn’t whether Nintendo has the right to protect its inventions. Of course it does. The question is whether “throwing a ball to catch a creature” is an invention at all — and whether Nintendo used its patent applications to hurt a competitor.
I’m Leonard French, your favorite copyright attorney. I look forward to reading your thoughts in the comments below.
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