Earlier this week, Palworld developer Pocketpair found itself in the crosshairs of a Nintendo patent lawsuit, making it the latest target in an infamous history of Nintendo legal action. Nintendo hasn't yet clarified the specifics of its lawsuit claims, but analysts and legal experts have already been offering their takes on how strong its case might be.
Serkan Toto, CEO of Japanese game industry consultant Kantan Games, told GamesRadar that "Nintendo is going into this lawsuit thinking that they're going to win. And I fear, looking at the track record, it's highly likely that they win." Having explored Nintendo's litigation history, I don't know if I'm qualified to speak to its odds—but I'm pretty confident it won't be pulling any punches.
Writing in the US, it's difficult to track the specifics of Nintendo's legal disputes in Japan. Some stories punch through the language barrier, like its 2018 lawsuit against mobile game developer Colopl over patent infringements involving virtual joysticks and sleep mode confirmation screens, which ended in a settlement awarding Nintendo ¥3.3 billion—somewhere in the realm of $23 million today.
Otherwise, Japanese patent suit records aren't readily available overseas, and Nintendo's Japanese corporate website, where it announced that it was pursuing legal action against Pocketpair, only translates some press releases into English. From Nintendo's history with American litigation, however, we can see a clear image of a corporation that's meticulously, overwhelmingly devoted to the protection of its intellectual property.
The best word for Nintendo's legal strategy might be "vengeful," and even that could be putting it lightly. As early as the '80s, Nintendo had no qualms about filing lawsuits as a means of retaliation. In 1989, unable to achieve a ban on videogame rentals, Nintendo found another way to draw blood from rental chains: In Nintendo of America, Inc. v. Blockbuster Entertainment Corp., Nintendo sued Blockbuster for photocopying its copyrighted game manuals to include with its rentals, eventually settling out of court for an undisclosed amount and forcing Blockbuster to distribute unofficial alternatives.
More recently, Nintendo has waged a long-running war against perceived copyright infractions online. YouTubers have endured years of widespread copyright strike campaigns over Nintendo game footage and music. ROM sites, hacked console distributors, and emulator developers, who've received their own share of Nintendo DMCA takedowns, have more recently been brought into court by escalating Nintendo lawsuits as it attempts to stamp out piracy wherever it can reach. And Nintendo's lawsuits have had a very reliable success record.
Some, like Sergio Moreno, a former seller of modded Switch hardware who was also ordered to destroy his hacked devices, received court injunctions preventing further copyright or patent infringement. Others, like ROM site operators Jacob and Cristian Mathias, faced fines that—in the Mathias's case—exceeded $12 million.
Nintendo's most brutal copyright case was suffered by Gary Bowser, a Canadian programmer affiliated with Team-Xecuter, a team of hackers who've been tied to a series of lawsuits that have awarded Nintendo millions in damages. After pleading guilty to charges of "conspiracy to circumvent technological measures and to traffic in circumvention devices," Bowser—a 54-year-old man with elephantitis-related chronic pain—has been fined a total of $14.5 million. "The sentence was like a message to other people," Bowser said after leaving prison in 2024.
Before Pocketpair earned its ire, Nintendo's last legal bloodbath began in 2023, when it lashed out at the Switch emulation ecosystem as a kind of divine retribution for the sin of leaking Tears of the Kingdom. Once TotK started appearing on pirate sites ahead of its official release, Nintendo targeted DMCA takedowns at Github software repos that Switch emulators relied on to decrypt and run game software, pirated or otherwise.
Months later, Nintendo had set its sights on the emulators themselves. In late February 2024, Nintendo filed a lawsuit against Tropic Haze LLC, developers of the Switch emulator Yuzu, claiming that the emulator's circumvention of proprietary Nintendo encryption software was a violation of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (that's what the "DMCA" you always hear about is short for), which forbids technology "primarily designed to circumvent technological measures that effectively control access to copyrighted works."
Within a week, the lawsuit concluded in a settlement awarding Nintendo $2.4 million and shuttering Yuzu's development and distribution, alongside "any other website or system that Defendant or its members own or control, directly or indirectly, that involves Nintendo’s Intellectual Property, to Plaintiff’s control." That included Citra, the 3DS emulator also developed by Tropic Haze, which shut down shortly after. With such a fast turnaround, it felt like Nintendo had spent the better part of a year ensuring that when it pulled the trigger on the Yuzu lawsuit, the shot wouldn't miss.
While Nintendo's lawsuit success record tends to have an obliterating effect on whoever's on the receiving end, it's worth noting that some have managed to survive a brush with its legal onslaught—emulators included. While Nintendo was able to prevent Dolphin's Steam release in 2023 by writing a letter to Valve, the GameCube and Wii emulator is still freely available. Nintendo claimed Dolphin also violates the DMCA's anti-circumvention statutes, but notably has never brought legal action against the emulator itself.
While the DMCA forbids technology "primarily designed" for piracy, circumventing copyright protection measures is permitted under US copyright law if it's "for the purpose of enabling interoperability of an independently created computer program." In Nintendo's original lawsuit filing against Yuzu, it made repeated reference to sections of Yuzu's now-offline website and Patreon page that could be construed as endorsing or encouraging piracy, potentially damaging what hopes Tropic Haze might've had to claim Yuzu wasn't "primarily designed" to circumvent copyright protections. The much simpler encryption of the Wii (and complete lack of encryption on the GameCube) likely insulate Dolphin from the same line of attack—especially if its backed by a healthy awareness of how its developers' messaging can be used against them.
The protections ensuring Dolphin's survival were, in part, brought about by one of Nintendo's earliest defeats in 1992's Lewis Galoob Toys, Inc. v. Nintendo of America, Inc., where Nintendo attempted to sue Galoob over its Game Genie, which had been reverse-engineered from NES hardware and, Nintendo claimed, infringed on its copyright. The courts ultimately found in Galoob's favor which, alongside rulings like Sega v. Accolade in the same year, helped cement reverse engineering as being beyond the scope of copyright infringement in American law.
Nintendo isn't omnipotent. Despite how it can sometimes seem, it can't win a lawsuit simply by declaring one. But, if its record is any indication, it'll have spent the eight months since Palworld's release crafting the loudest message a lawsuit can tell.
