Palworld Collects Four Steam Medals as Nintendo's Lawsuit Shrinks to Chump Change

Palworld closed out 2025 holding new hardware. The game earned four nominations at Steam's Best of 2025 Awards and converted them into four medals: silver for Most Played and Most Played on Steam Deck, plus bronze for Top Seller and best Controller game. Hollow Knight: Silksong took the headline prize for best game. A two-year-old title still in early access landing second for most played is not where most observers expected Pocketpair's "Pokémon with guns" to sit.

Pocketpair marked the result on its official X account. "Thank you so much, everyone," the studio wrote.

"We are working hard on the official release of Palworld, Palworld 1.0, this year!"

The post ended with "news soon," a nod to the 1.0 launch slated for 2026. Ahead of the holidays, Pocketpair stepped back from community work to concentrate on fixing bugs before that release, and it is preparing fresh content along the lines of the 2024 winter update that added an island, new resources, and mechanics.

Communications director Bucky summed up the reaction:

"Two years later and we're still humbled by our community's endless support and kindness. Thank you so, so, so much, Palworld games. Not bad for a dead game!!"

— Bucky

The "dead game" line reads as a jab at the obituaries Palworld has collected since launch. It reached nearly 2.1 million concurrent Steam players within days of arriving in early 2024, then held a base that few viral hits keep. Subreddits turned the premise of shooting cute creatures into a running joke, and the studio leaned in, once handing the whole team a day off to mark a major release. The game still pulls around 85,000 concurrent players and climbs to between 140,000 and 212,000 during major updates, a range that puts it alongside CS2, Dota 2, and GTA V. Pocketpair has fed that base through patches rather than a live-service grind, adding systems such as the trust mechanic and fishing in v0.6.0.

All of this continues despite Nintendo's lawsuit pressure that has trailed Pocketpair since September 2024, when Nintendo and The Pokémon Company filed for patent infringement in Japan. The patents cover summoning creatures with a throw and gliding on a caught creature, both central to Pokémon-style play. Pocketpair changed the game to sidestep them. A December 2024 update pulled the Pal Sphere and reworked gliding so players now need an actual glider rather than a Pal.

Those edits matter to the money, and the money is where Nintendo's position looks thin. Writing for games fray, IP analyst and former Blizzard employee Florian Mueller set out why the case has lost most of its commercial bite. The court has scheduled a presentation of evidence for October 1 and will give its opinion on November 9, 2026. In November 2025, Nintendo and Pokémon narrowed their claims to older versions of Palworld, the builds that existed before Pocketpair patched out the disputed mechanics.

"This litigation is no longer about anything serious in commercial terms,"

Mueller wrote.

His reasoning rests on timing. The three patents-in-suit were filed and published after Palworld's January 2024 release, so the bulk of the game's sales fell outside any damages window. They claimed priority back to a 2021 application for validity purposes, but that does not change when the patents actually existed. They were granted later in 2024, and Pocketpair modified the game soon after, closing the window further. A Japanese patent applies only in Japan, which strips out worldwide sales. I read Mueller's breakdown as the clearest sign yet that Nintendo built a case it cannot cash in. The ceiling, by his estimate, is 5 million yen, roughly $30,000, which he called chump change for either side and a rounding error next to Nintendo's legal bills.

PC Gamer noted the original suit sought around $66,000 in damages, so Nintendo now stands to collect less than half its opening figure if it wins at all. Pocketpair has filed numerous invalidity challenges and non-infringement arguments, backed by expert opinions from former judges. Its prior-art filings point to mechanics already present in Zelda, Tomb Raider, ARK, Rune Factory, and the Pixelmon mod. Any of those defenses could leave Nintendo with nothing.

The wider patent picture has not broken Nintendo's way. Both the Japan Patent Office and the US Patent and Trademark Office have grown skeptical of its game-rule applications. Videogame patent lawyer Kirk Sigmon called Nintendo's newest Pokémon-related patents "an embarrassing failure of the US patent system" that "should not have happened." Nintendo's most recent annual report logged a $40 million loss from patent litigation. Sony and Tencent settled their own dispute in December 2025, and Mueller noted the Palworld case would normally be ripe for settlement at this stage.

I think the medals and the crossovers tell the more useful story, because they show a studio expanding while its courtroom risk narrows. Pocketpair announced a two-player competitive card game while the suit was active. It shipped Palworld X ULTRAKILL on December 17, 2025, the game's second major crossover after Terraria, importing the shooter's weapons, its coin-parry move, and playable takes on V.1 and V.2 under a "Home Sweet Home" update that also added a structure-recoloring tool. The cadence shows how Pocketpair now treats collaborations as routine development beats. ULTRAKILL carries more than 120,000 positive Steam reviews, and the trailer closed on a shadowed silhouette many fans tied to the long-teased Colossal Whale, a hint at 1.0 content.

The studio also opened a second front in the genre. Pocketpair revealed Palworld’s Farming Spin-Off, Palfarm, eleven days after Nintendo showed off Pokopia, its own Pokémon life-sim. Palfarm drops players on a countryside plot to grow crops and mine with Pals, with hostile Pals raiding farms to add combat, and it follows farming sims like Stardew Valley in look and loop. Its Steam page frames the design bluntly: "After all, combat is a form of harvesting in its own way." Pokopia, revealed at a September Nintendo Direct and built by Koei Tecmo with Game Freak involvement, casts a humanoid Ditto and lands on Switch 2 in 2026. Palfarm has no release date and sits on Steam as a wishlist entry, and the proximity of the two reveals fed the familiar charge that Pocketpair tracks Nintendo's moves.

Palworld stays in early access for now, with 1.0 close. Nintendo's maximum recovery sits near $30,000 for a short run of sales in a single country, and the court delivers its read on November 9.