As Nintendo and The Pokemon Company continue their patent infringement lawsuit against Palworld developer Pocketpair in Japan, the two companies are now seeing a controversial new patent get re-examined in the US, in a move that could potentially have implications on other devs if things don't go Nintendo's way.
Patent 12,403,397 came into the spotlight back in September after concerns were raised regarding the potential impact that it could have on games should Nintendo choose to enforce it, the reason being that it's rather broad, and describes the idea of summoning "sub-characters" to fight manually or automatically in battle – not exactly an uncommon game concept.
The United States Patent and Trademark Office director seems to think this might be the case, too, as he ordered this new re-examination himself, citing two examples of "prior art" which could prove that claims in Nintendo and The Pokemon Company's patent aren't novel enough to be patentable.
