There’s been a lot of focus on three Pokémon patents since Nintendo and The Pokémon Company sued Palworld maker Pocketpair for alleged patent infringement, but now there’s a new patent making headlines. Nintendo and The Pokémon Company were awarded a patent on September 2, 2025, covering summoning and auto-battling mechanics that, as The Verge reported on September 17, sounds a lot like the system from Pokémon Scarlet and Pokémon Violet.
Haley McLean, a video game lawyer with Voyer Law, told Game Developer U.S. Patent No. 12,403,397 is a “method patent” that deals with the software operations related to the summoning and autobattling. “To boil it down, most simply, it’s [when] I throw out a little guy, and if there’s another little guy it could fight, they fight,’” she said. “If there’s no little guy there, they start idling and moving around a bit. If I point in a certain direction, my little guy can go that way. And if they encounter something aggro, they get into a fight automatically.”
There’s been a lot of confusion online about the scope of the patent—how could Nintendo and The Pokémon Company patent summoning creatures into battle?—and how it impacts the broader video game industry. What’s crucial about the patent is that it’s not simply patenting summoning a creature into battle; for a game to be infringing, it would have to mimic the whole system, not just a part of it. Still, there’s an anxiety to it all: Could Nintendo and The Pokémon Company come after other games with similar mechanics, as it has with Palworld?
René Otto, video game attorney and Deviant Legal founder, told Game Developer the patent doesn’t necessarily mean Nintendo and The Pokémon Company now have a “monopoly on creature capturing and taming,” or even auto-battling. “Instead, Nintendo has the exclusive right to use the combination of mechanics as described in the awarded patent for as long as the patent is deemed valid,” he said.
Another question is whether or not the patent is valid—or, rather, whether it would hold up if challenged? The patent has already been awarded, and there’s no undoing that without a legal challenge, which is unlikely, McLean said; it’s expensive in both money and time to challenge a patent. But there’s still debate as to whether it would hold up if challenged, centered around the idea of whether the patent covers an idea or not. You can’t patent ideas, McLean noted. “There’s so much case law trying to figure out whether a patent is an idea,” she said.
“Nintendo and other large companies have very good lawyers who are very good at drafting ideas to sound like software.”
Patenting software makes things complicated. “It’s very easy to talk about an idea that happens on software and make it sound like the software is new and useful and non-obvious,” McLean continued.
“But if you boil away all the software language, what the [United States Patent and Trademark Office] should be doing is saying, ‘Is this an idea that happens on software, or is this software that executes an idea to the point that the software is the thing that’s unique, non-obvious.’ It gets very muddled, and Nintendo and other large companies have very good lawyers who are very good at drafting ideas to sound like software.”
You can see this in how the software processing is referenced in the patent: Nintendo and The Pokémon Company have filed the patent as relating “to a storage medium, an information processing system, an information processing apparatus, and a game processing method for executing a game in which a plurality of characters battle with each other.”
So, should game developers be worried?
McLean said the issue at hand isn’t necessarily this one patent. There are hundreds of other patents— belonging to companies other than Nintendo—that exist in this complex space. “We’re going to get to a point where developers are going to have to know about hundreds of patents to know if their specific systems—not just summoning, but tons of other things that are in games,” she said.
The United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) is behind on games, McLean said. It’s really hard for an examiner to assess whether something has been done before, or solves a new problem , or is nonobvious in general because video games are long. There are a lot of them, and they’re not always easy to access—especially older ones.
Nintendo provided the patent examiner a link to its own website as a reference, McLean said. The USPTO publishes the references cited and patents searched (via Gamesfray, so the public can see what the examiner looked at. With Nintendo and The Pokémon Company’s new patent, the examiner looked at other patents, but doesn’t appear to have looked at other games.
And there’s no easy answer for this issue under the USPTO. Big companies may be able to take on patents they think are invalid, but independent developers or smaller studios without a ton of capital simply won’t be able to take on that fight.
Corporations, like Nintendo, have shown that they’re willing to enforce their patents. The company is currently suing Palworld developer Pocketpair over three patents related to catching creatures, aiming the ball one throws at said creatures, and riding on them.
It’s not that patents are inherently bad, according to McLean. They’re meant to reward innovation, not hinder it. But the system can create an environment of anxiety around infringing, even if it’s unlikely. Otto said that patent descriptions can be “abstract and vague.”
“It casts this giant shroud of anxiety that’s maybe OK for the big boys, for the triple-A studios that have enough lawyers on their team to assess these things constantly, but for the little indie devs, it just doesn’t make sense for the industry in this way,” McLean added.