Nintendo’s attempt to lock down a gameplay mechanic tied to summoning a secondary character has run into trouble in the US. A patent examiner has issued a non-final rejection that knocks out all 26 claims, putting the company’s fight with Pocketpair and Palworld into a shakier legal position.
The core dispute is familiar enough to make a lot of developers roll their eyes: can a company claim ownership over a Pokémon gameplay mechanic that has appeared in different forms across games for years? Nintendo says the patent covers a specific system, but the US Patent and Trademark Office is now treating it as something that may have been obvious rather than inventive. That distinction is the whole ballgame in patent law, and it tends to be less forgiving than a fan forum.
Why the Pokémon patent examiner rejected every claim
The rejection does not revoke the patent immediately. It starts a reexamination process that could still end with parts of the filing surviving, or the whole thing collapsing. The examiner’s argument leans on prior art, including earlier patent filings from Bandai Namco, Konami, and Nintendo itself, rather than on live examples from existing games.
That matters because patent offices do not need a mechanic to be famous to question it; they only need to show that a typical developer could have combined existing ideas without much leap of imagination. Nintendo can still argue that the references are being stitched together too casually, which is the sort of defense companies like to make when a patent starts looking broader than advertised.
Nintendo’s response window is the next battleground
Nintendo now has a limited window to respond, with extensions available. Its legal team is expected to challenge both the prior-art interpretation and the idea that game developers would naturally merge those references into the patented system. Even so, the examiner has also raised two separate invalidity arguments for each claim, which gives Nintendo more than one hole to plug.
- All 26 claims were rejected in the first Office action.
- The challenge is based on prior art, not on live game examples.
- Nintendo still gets a chance to answer before any final outcome.
For the wider games industry, the case is bigger than one mechanic in one franchise. Companies have spent years trying to turn familiar design ideas into enforceable intellectual property, and patent offices have not always been eager to indulge that ambition. If this reexamination keeps moving against Nintendo, it could make publishers more cautious about patenting mechanics that many developers would call old hat with better branding.
The result is still uncertain, but the direction is hard to miss. If Nintendo persuades the examiner, the patent survives and the legal fight continues. If not, the company may end up with a very public reminder that in game design, ”novel” is a lot harder to prove than ”popular.”