Videogame IP lawyer says Nintendo could've been planning its Pocketpair lawsuit before Palworld even released: 'If you know who you're going to go sue, you can draft claims to target them'

Last week, Nintendo released a statement announcing a patent lawsuit against Palworld developer Pocketpair. Given Nintendo's infamous reputation for applying overwhelming legal pressure, the announcement led plenty of us to wonder when in the eight months since Palworld's release Nintendo might've started setting its litigation gears in motion. According to patent lawyer Kirk Sigmon, Nintendo might've been planning its patent lawsuit before Palworld even launched.

While Nintendo hasn't publicized which patents it's accusing Pocketpair of infringing, the generally-held assumption is that Nintendo's basing its lawsuit around patents it filed on creature-capturing and riding mechanics during the development of 2022 Switch game Pokemon Legends: Arceus. During an interview with PC Gamer covering the Palworld lawsuit, I asked Sigmon to explain the amendments, continuations, and divisional applications that those patents had received, according to US and Japanese patent databases.

A patent continuation, called a divisional application in Japan, allows a patent holder to file for additional patent claims and intellectual property protections on the concepts covered by the original patent. «Let's say a filing describes throwing a Poké Ball, rideable objects, and something else. If the original patent claims only covered throwing a Poké Ball, they file a divisional application and say, 'We're going to now draft claims that relate to rideable objects. It's a little bit different, but we're going to go after that,'» Sigmon explained.

One of the benefits of divisional applications, Sigmon said, is that they provide the patent holder—Nintendo, in this case—with an opportunity to optimize the definitions of their patent claims for eventual lawsuit assertion. In other words, if you're Nintendo and you notice your competition's about to release a product that's similar to a patent you hold, you can start drafting divisional patents in advance to arm yourself with the best possible