Palworld Online Just Got Announced — Pocketpair Clearly Isn’t Scared another lawsuit

I’ll be honest, this one caught me completely off guard. Palworld Online got announced this week — Garena, the folks behind Free Fire, are building a mobile-first Palworld MMO under an official license from Pocketpair (Gematsu). Not a straight port. A whole separate game, built from the ground up for phones, aiming for sometime in 2026 with no trailer, no screenshots, and no actual date attached yet (Kotaku).

And I want to sit with that for a second, because it did not occur to me at all that this was coming.

Didn’t Nintendo Just Sue Them?

Yes. That lawsuit is still going. As of the last time I wrote about this (the patent thing, the one where a Japanese examiner basically roasted Nintendo in an official government document), Nintendo and The Pokémon Company were still actively suing Pocketpair, still holding granted patents, and still very much in the fight. None of that has resolved. There’s no settlement. There’s no verdict. The suit is just sitting there, ongoing, the way these things do for years.

Which makes the timing of this announcement genuinely wild to me. You’d think a company staring down a lawsuit from one of the most litigious, well-funded IP owners on the planet would want to keep a low profile. Ship what’s already shipped. Maybe not remind everyone the source material of the entire dispute still exists and is popular enough to spin off into new products. Instead, Pocketpair licensed out the Palworld name to not one but two separate mobile publishers — Krafton’s been quietly working on their own mobile Palworld project since late 2024 (TalkEsport), and now Garena’s stepping into the ring with a full MMO version, running in parallel.

Two different companies. Two different Palworld mobile games. At the same time. While the lawsuit that exists specifically because of Palworld’s mechanics is still unresolved.

So What Gave Them the Confidence?

This is the part I keep turning over. Companies don’t usually expand a product line that’s currently the subject of active litigation unless they’ve got a reason to believe the ground under them is more solid than it looks from the outside. So what’s the reason here?

Maybe it’s as simple as: their lawyers are telling them the case is more survivable than the discourse around it suggests. Maybe the patent rejections I wrote about last month — Japan’s patent office knocking down a sibling application, twice, citing a decade-old fan game as prior art — actually did more damage to Nintendo’s position than either side is saying publicly. Maybe Pocketpair just did the math and decided the commercial upside of two licensed mobile spinoffs outweighs whatever risk the lawsuit still represents, because the games are different enough from what’s actually being litigated. I genuinely don’t know. I’m speculating same as everyone else watching this happen.

But confidence like this doesn’t usually come from nowhere. Something changed the calculus. I just don’t think we’re seeing all of it from the outside yet.

Do They Actually Have a Shot Against Nintendo?

This is the bigger question, and I don’t think anyone actually knows the answer, including the lawyers involved. Nintendo has essentially unlimited resources, a patent portfolio built specifically to defend the Pokémon formula, and a well-documented history of not backing down from IP fights until they get what they want. That’s not a knock on them, that’s just who they are as a company. They play the long game and they usually win it.

But Pocketpair keeps doing the opposite of what a company on the back foot is supposed to do. They shipped Palworld’s 1.0 release to huge numbers. They’re now expanding into two separate mobile products with major publishing partners who presumably did their own legal diligence before signing on — Garena and Krafton aren’t small operations, and neither one licenses IP casually while a lawsuit is live. That alone tells me the people with the most to lose here think the exposure is manageable.

Is that actually true? Or is everyone involved just betting that the lawsuit drags on long enough that it stops mattering commercially either way? I don’t know. Genuinely don’t. But watching the supposed underdog keep expanding instead of retreating is not what I expected to be writing about this week, and I’m here for it.

Whatever’s actually going on behind the scenes, I did not see this coming, and I’m delighted I was wrong.

Elfishchunk is not a lawyer, has said this before, and will keep saying it every time this topic comes up because it remains true.