Krafton has announced that it’s developing a Palworld mobile game in partnership with Pocketpair, despite Nintendo’s ongoing legal action against the latter.
Last month, Nintendo announced that it's suing Palworld developer Pocketpair for infringing on "multiple patent rights". In response, the PS5 port was indefinitely delayed in Japan, and a lawyer claimed that Palworld may even have to rework its game mechanics if Nintendo wins.
In any case, the announcement comes from a Krafton Press Release, which reveals that the company has signed a licensing agreement for the intellectual property (IP) of ‘Palworld.’
However, Pocketpair isn't dissuaded and is instead fighting the suit "to ensure that indie game developers are not hindered or discouraged from pursung their creative ideas", while publisher Krafton just announced that it has a new Palworld game in development.
The announcement reads that, “Through this contract, Krafton will expand the Palworld IP to the mobile platform. It plans to faithfully reinterpret and implement the original’s main fun elements to fit the mobile environment. The project will be handled by the development team of ‘PUBG STUDIOS,’ a creative studio under Krafton.”
Kratfon says it’s expanding the IP to mobile, but it’s currently unclear how similar it’ll be to the survival game megahit that first hit PC back in January. It’ll be interesting to see whether it’s a premium game with a familiar structure or a Palworld spinoff in a different genre altogether.
Despite pushing on with a new game and a shadowdropped PS5 port, analyst Serkan Toto said that he believes things will "end bad for Pocketpair".
"Nintendo is famously protective of its IP, and they have a very, very strong legal team that is feared in the Japanese gaming industry," Toto expalined. "You don't want to make Nintendo angry. Nintendo wanted to be absolutely thorough. They didn't want to shoot from the hip."
He believes that Nintendo waited so long to file the lawsuit because it wanted an iron-clad case, which may be why it focused on patent infringement rather than copyright. We don't know what the patent infringements are yet, but they seemingly refer to catching 'mons with a Pokeball, which is why lawyers believe that Palworld may have to change how you catch its creatures. If the mobile game uses similar mechanics, it might also need to undergo an overhaul before release.
Palworld’s release on PC and Xbox attracted 25 million players and reached the third-highest number of concurrent users on Steam of all time. The game made its debut on the PlayStation 5 in September.