Amid the Palworld lawsuit, Japan's Patent Office strikes down a related creature-capture patent for Nintendo, dealing a potential blow to the case.
Japan’s patent office has rejected a Nintendo application related to its Palworld lawsuit, citing a lack of originality. The decision raises questions about the validity of several Nintendo patents describing creature capture systems that are central to the company’s complaint against Palworld.
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In late October 2025, the Japan Patent Office rejected Nintendo’s patent application no. 2024-031879, which is related to the family of creature-capture patents that Palworld is accused of infringing. A JPO patent examiner found that the application lacks originality to be deemed an invention, citing prior art such as Monster Hunter 4, ARK: Survival Evolved, gacha browser game Kantai Collection, Pocketpair’s own Craftopia, and even Pokemon GO. All of those were released prior to the December 2021 priority date from the rejected application.
Nintendo has 60 days from the date of its rejection notice to amend its application or appeal the decision, giving it until late December 2025 to do so. Since the application isn’t cited in the Palworld patent lawsuit directly, its rejection won’t have a direct impact on the ongoing case. However, as explained by Games Fray’s analyst Florian Mueller, the newly rejected application is a “key building block” in Nintendo’s strategy to capture a wide range of creature-capture system implementations. It is the child of patent JP7493117 and the parent of JP7545191, both of which are cited in Nintendo’s complaint.
tl:dr;
The Nintendo v PalWorld lawsuit is still on going, but Nintendo has been told it’s attempt to patent the concept of a capturable and summonable creature is invalid, in Japan.
As part of their ongoing lawsuit, Nintendo is claiming PalWorld has violated those… now invalid patents, so Nintendo’s overall case against PalWorld is now significantly more weak.
Even though I think some Palworld designs are questionable, I’m devastated by Pokemon’s wasted potential and Nintendo’s laziness surrounding the franchise. It sucks that they’re the only major catch-em-all game we’ve got, they don’t have to try because they have no competition. I tried Cassette Beasts, and while I think the fusion and type system is pretty good, the story and characters were lacking for me so I haven’t finished it. I have no desire for Yo-kai watch, and I don’t feel like playing Digimon.
Even if I’ll never play “Pokemon: Breath of the Fortnite” I still want Palworld to do well and flip Nintendo off for being an ass. That “riding is only allowed in our games” patent is total bullshit.
The decision mentions ARK, which has always been one of my arguments. It’s a survival builder with Dinos, but almost every creature is capturable/tamable in some way or another, aside from some bosses/special enemies. Ark has been around a while, and even added a stored in a ball like element years back, but it probably doesn’t exactly come to mind as a catch em all game for most people.
lol, I still remember being utterly baffled by how many Nintendo uberfans were just blown away by the kind of construction / physics elements of BotW.
Like… I’d been playing Garry’s mod for years before it even became a game, sold for money.
I was doing that kind of construction silliness … what, before Twilight Princess came out? Something like that?
Funniest part is that learning how to fuck around in lua there, was what spurred me on to learning programming… whereas Nintendo fans kind of tend to be the Apple fans of the video game world… on average, they don’t really know anything about hardware or software, compared to an Xbox or Playstation fan, if you compare people of similar ages in each of those fandoms.
So, I remeber ending up inadvertently triggering a fair number of BotW fans when I just started to describe havok/source physics calls, as well as contraptions I’d built an actual decade prior.
ACF is fucking bonkers, don’t know if its still maintained, but yeah I basically just made my model minfigs of tanks and ifvs and such in digital, functional form, hahah!
I’ve played Gmod since probably around 2007, but IMO this is a bit disingenuous.
EDIT: also, I’m not a Nintendo lover, actually pretty much hate them for issuing takedowns of fan games and let’s plays.
The physics in Tears of the Kingdom is way more stable than Havok. In Gmod even putting a bunch of cans inside a crate can make them start vibrating or cause them to fly out at a million miles per hour after you try picking them up. Walking around on a moving physics object is extremely jank, and can cause you to phase through it or just be killed instantly by mysterious physical forces that appear out of nowhere. In particular, the puzzles that use chains (which have collision with themselves and other objects, unlike Source engine ropes that phase through everything), are way beyond anything you could do reliably with Havok.
In addition to that, TotK takes Gmod’s mechanics and uses them as the basis for combat encounters and puzzles, inside an actual campaign with a narrative, environmental design, music, etc. That sort of thing adds a lot; just look at Portal vs Narbacular drop.
And yeah, I know that there are community made gamemodes for Gmod that use its physics mechanics for all kinds of stuff. None of those are a 70 hour long professionally designed campaign. That’s not to say that I think TotK’s campaign is strictly ‘superior’ to that community made content, or should be viewed as a substitute for it, but I also don’t think the opposite is true either. These are simply two different types of experiences, and neither replaces the other.
I very distinctly remember these real world social interactions I had with BotW players around the game’s release… I very distinctly remember accidentally pissing them off by not being blown away by the construction mechanics, when I said something like ‘oh that’s neat, they did some Garry’s mod style stuff!’
That was apparently not enthusiastic enough for them, and they literally exiled me from their friend group after that.
Rest of post encapsulated so as to not blow up the thread
And uh, the specific problems you mention with GMod?
The standing/moving while on a phys object being jank? Yeah you can fairly easily fix a good deal of that in GMod by toggling some server side settings, you can more comprehensively fix that by writing some gamemode logic in lua that moderates/alters/hooks into the source/havok phyics.
The ropes don’t act like chains? Yeah, cuz… they aren’t chains, they’re meant to be cheap, but good as a minor element, visual effects. They don’t collide because they’re basically fancy 2D sprites.
You can make actual physical chains with actual physicaly colliding links via a series of joint connected props, pretty sure there are just tools and methods you can find now that let you automate and customize the generation of such things.
In both of these cases, basically what you do is just clamp maximum translational and rotational acceleration magnitudes below a certain threshold… thats one main ‘trick’ that source/havok/gmod doesn’t do by default, that BotW does, anither one is just hard limit the number of potentially active physics capable objects in any given scene down to a lower number… Gmod by default allows for a lot more than BotW does… its up to you to tune that.
Also, Gmod had a bunch of early gamemodes that involved having to construct something, given some limitation set, to achieve some specific goal, or gamemodes that were more like some kind of other common at the time game, but made use of on the fly, but tightly regulated, snap build type construction mechanics, sort of like fortnite, but from a first person POV.
I guess you just never played these?
I guess people don’t realize that GMod was basically a precursor to Roblox.
Its more of a platform for making wildly different kinds of games than it is just… ‘a game’.
Gmod just didn’t have a built in currency system, Gmod gamemode developers had to (and did) figure out how to tie that into some kind of out of game webserver/db to keep track of player accounts and purchases, and then tie that back to the player’s in game inventory/abilities.
… I know everything I am saying here, because I either knew people who did all of this stuff, wrote it from scratch, or I did it myself, or I helpes them solve particular problems they were stuck on, or visa versa, etc.
Anyway, yeah obviously BotW has a huge open world and an actual narrative storyline and all that good stuff.
It has that, plus some simplified version of Gmod buildy stuff, neat!
But ‘neat!’ wasn’t ‘unprecedented and my mind has been blown’.
I’m not saying the whole BotW game was just… bad. I’m saying it was pretty neat, but… ultimately, not anything I had not seen before, many prior games had at that point had basically all the individual game mechanics in BotW, BotW was a unique combination of thing’s I’d seen before, but no individual element of it… really sticks out to me as very unique.
Which is fine! Games are almost all ‘what mix and match of systems and elements do we want, to make what comprehensive, total experience?’
In summary, no, no my account is not disingenuous, you just aren’t very familiar with or have as much experience with Gmod as I do.
And that’s probably a good thing: while Gmod offers a lot of possibilities, it also has one of the worst and most toxic communities of any game I’ve ever played.
I could go on about how… the comparison to Roblox also extends to massive problems with grooming and sexual predation / exploitation of children, but that would probably be fairly far from the original topic.
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YES!
Even though I think some Palworld designs are questionable, I’m devastated by Pokemon’s wasted potential and Nintendo’s laziness surrounding the franchise. It sucks that they’re the only major catch-em-all game we’ve got, they don’t have to try because they have no competition. I tried Cassette Beasts, and while I think the fusion and type system is pretty good, the story and characters were lacking for me so I haven’t finished it. I have no desire for Yo-kai watch, and I don’t feel like playing Digimon.
Even if I’ll never play “Pokemon: Breath of the Fortnite” I still want Palworld to do well and flip Nintendo off for being an ass. That “riding is only allowed in our games” patent is total bullshit.
I swear, I feel like I’m the only person who doesn’t give a shit about “catching them all” and just caught what I wanted and played the story.
I couldn’t imagine wasting my time going after dumb shit because the game’s slogan told me to. It must be autism, or something.
The decision mentions ARK, which has always been one of my arguments. It’s a survival builder with Dinos, but almost every creature is capturable/tamable in some way or another, aside from some bosses/special enemies. Ark has been around a while, and even added a stored in a ball like element years back, but it probably doesn’t exactly come to mind as a catch em all game for most people.
lol, I still remember being utterly baffled by how many Nintendo uberfans were just blown away by the kind of construction / physics elements of BotW.
Like… I’d been playing Garry’s mod for years before it even became a game, sold for money.
I was doing that kind of construction silliness … what, before Twilight Princess came out? Something like that?
Funniest part is that learning how to fuck around in lua there, was what spurred me on to learning programming… whereas Nintendo fans kind of tend to be the Apple fans of the video game world… on average, they don’t really know anything about hardware or software, compared to an Xbox or Playstation fan, if you compare people of similar ages in each of those fandoms.
So, I remeber ending up inadvertently triggering a fair number of BotW fans when I just started to describe havok/source physics calls, as well as contraptions I’d built an actual decade prior.
ACF is fucking bonkers, don’t know if its still maintained, but yeah I basically just made my model minfigs of tanks and ifvs and such in digital, functional form, hahah!
Did you mean TotK instead of BotW?
I’ve played Gmod since probably around 2007, but IMO this is a bit disingenuous.
EDIT: also, I’m not a Nintendo lover, actually pretty much hate them for issuing takedowns of fan games and let’s plays.
The physics in Tears of the Kingdom is way more stable than Havok. In Gmod even putting a bunch of cans inside a crate can make them start vibrating or cause them to fly out at a million miles per hour after you try picking them up. Walking around on a moving physics object is extremely jank, and can cause you to phase through it or just be killed instantly by mysterious physical forces that appear out of nowhere. In particular, the puzzles that use chains (which have collision with themselves and other objects, unlike Source engine ropes that phase through everything), are way beyond anything you could do reliably with Havok.
In addition to that, TotK takes Gmod’s mechanics and uses them as the basis for combat encounters and puzzles, inside an actual campaign with a narrative, environmental design, music, etc. That sort of thing adds a lot; just look at Portal vs Narbacular drop.
And yeah, I know that there are community made gamemodes for Gmod that use its physics mechanics for all kinds of stuff. None of those are a 70 hour long professionally designed campaign. That’s not to say that I think TotK’s campaign is strictly ‘superior’ to that community made content, or should be viewed as a substitute for it, but I also don’t think the opposite is true either. These are simply two different types of experiences, and neither replaces the other.
No, I mean BotW.
I very distinctly remember these real world social interactions I had with BotW players around the game’s release… I very distinctly remember accidentally pissing them off by not being blown away by the construction mechanics, when I said something like ‘oh that’s neat, they did some Garry’s mod style stuff!’
That was apparently not enthusiastic enough for them, and they literally exiled me from their friend group after that.
Rest of post encapsulated so as to not blow up the thread
And uh, the specific problems you mention with GMod?
The standing/moving while on a phys object being jank? Yeah you can fairly easily fix a good deal of that in GMod by toggling some server side settings, you can more comprehensively fix that by writing some gamemode logic in lua that moderates/alters/hooks into the source/havok phyics.
The ropes don’t act like chains? Yeah, cuz… they aren’t chains, they’re meant to be cheap, but good as a minor element, visual effects. They don’t collide because they’re basically fancy 2D sprites.
You can make actual physical chains with actual physicaly colliding links via a series of joint connected props, pretty sure there are just tools and methods you can find now that let you automate and customize the generation of such things.
In both of these cases, basically what you do is just clamp maximum translational and rotational acceleration magnitudes below a certain threshold… thats one main ‘trick’ that source/havok/gmod doesn’t do by default, that BotW does, anither one is just hard limit the number of potentially active physics capable objects in any given scene down to a lower number… Gmod by default allows for a lot more than BotW does… its up to you to tune that.
Also, Gmod had a bunch of early gamemodes that involved having to construct something, given some limitation set, to achieve some specific goal, or gamemodes that were more like some kind of other common at the time game, but made use of on the fly, but tightly regulated, snap build type construction mechanics, sort of like fortnite, but from a first person POV.
I guess you just never played these?
I guess people don’t realize that GMod was basically a precursor to Roblox.
Its more of a platform for making wildly different kinds of games than it is just… ‘a game’.
Gmod just didn’t have a built in currency system, Gmod gamemode developers had to (and did) figure out how to tie that into some kind of out of game webserver/db to keep track of player accounts and purchases, and then tie that back to the player’s in game inventory/abilities.
… I know everything I am saying here, because I either knew people who did all of this stuff, wrote it from scratch, or I did it myself, or I helpes them solve particular problems they were stuck on, or visa versa, etc.
Anyway, yeah obviously BotW has a huge open world and an actual narrative storyline and all that good stuff.
It has that, plus some simplified version of Gmod buildy stuff, neat!
But ‘neat!’ wasn’t ‘unprecedented and my mind has been blown’.
I’m not saying the whole BotW game was just… bad. I’m saying it was pretty neat, but… ultimately, not anything I had not seen before, many prior games had at that point had basically all the individual game mechanics in BotW, BotW was a unique combination of thing’s I’d seen before, but no individual element of it… really sticks out to me as very unique.
Which is fine! Games are almost all ‘what mix and match of systems and elements do we want, to make what comprehensive, total experience?’
In summary, no, no my account is not disingenuous, you just aren’t very familiar with or have as much experience with Gmod as I do.
And that’s probably a good thing: while Gmod offers a lot of possibilities, it also has one of the worst and most toxic communities of any game I’ve ever played.
I could go on about how… the comparison to Roblox also extends to massive problems with grooming and sexual predation / exploitation of children, but that would probably be fairly far from the original topic.