Legal Experts Say Nintendo’s Monster Summoning Patent Likely Wouldn’t Survive In Court, But Will Still Deter Competition

By Elijah Gonzalez | September 11, 2025 | 11:04am

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Legal Experts Say Nintendo’s Monster Summoning Patent Likely Wouldn’t Survive In Court, But Will Still Deter Competition

Last week, the US Patent and Trademark Office made a decision with potentially massive ramifications to the game industry: they granted Nintendo a patent that covers the gameplay mechanic of summoning a character to have it fight. At least on paper, this seems to imply that Nintendo has intellectual property rights over the monster-summoning genre, which covers games like Digimon, Temtem, and many more. The news comes amid Nintendo and The Pokémon Company’s ongoing litigation against Palworld developer Pocketpair over the violation of their existing patents.

While we’re not lawyers and don’t have the expertise to weigh in on what Nintendo’s recent win means in practice, thankfully, Eurogamer interviewed legal experts on the matter. Former chief legal officer at The Pokémon Company, Don McGowan, told Eurogamer that he believes the patent will likely be ignored by competitors. “I wish Nintendo and Pokémon good luck when the first other developer just entirely ignores this patent and, if those companies sue that developer, the developer shows decades of prior art.”

Unfortunately, not all of the experts interviewed were quite as optimistic. This wasn’t because they believed that Nintendo is likely to win a case regarding the patent if it went to court, but because the mere existence of their IP claim will likely have a chilling effect that discourages competition.

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“The filing for such patent protection indicates that Nintendo does intend to pursue a legal strategy in defending itself against entrants in the pocket monster genre,” games industry lawyer Richard Hoeg said to Eurogamer. “But that strategy may or may not involve lawsuits, as the ‘muddying of the waters’ effected by the patent’s existence may be enough to deter investment in and creation of competitors. That is, if Nintendo looks like it could pounce, that may be enough. No actual pouncing required.”

Hoeg goes on, “So yes, it’s enforceable in so far as it has been granted, but Nintendo likely knows it ‘got away with one’ here and would prefer not to make a court actually sign off.”

Recently, the American legal system has had a difficult time curtailing the power and influence of tech companies, with the FTC failing to stop the Activision Blizzard merger and Google avoiding the worst-case scenario in its own antitrust case, among others. “Law and technology are often strange bedfellows, and in my opinion the patent office has appeared out of its depth on evaluating video games for quite some time,” said Hoeg. “It may be time for reform there.”