The final court hearing between Nintendo and Palworld creators is approaching - the culprit may have to pay around $30,000

It seems that Nintendo's lawyers will not be able to "kill" Palworld after all.

The sensational survival game Palworld attracted the attention of not only ordinary players but also Nintendo's lawyers. The design of the local "Pals" strongly resembled creatures from the Pokémon franchise, and some gameplay mechanics, such as catching creatures, also raised questions.

The lawsuit between the parties is gradually moving towards completion, and intellectual property expert Florian Mueller shared his opinion on Nintendo's prospects. He believes that the company will only be able to receive about $30,000 if they win. However, what (as he thinks) is a more likely scenario, the "big N" may lose this case.

Florian notes that last year, Nintendo and The Pokémon Company changed the scope of their claims, so the case is now limited to older versions of Palworld, and not all versions of the game (this is attributed to the fact that the game's creators released updates that changed the disputed mechanics).

According to Mueller, he "sees no path to victory over any current or very recent version of Palworld (or version 1.0, which is due out soon)." He expressed the opinion that "there will be no injunction with real consequences."

According to the expert, the maximum Nintendo can get is 5 million yen, which is about 30 thousand dollars:

Palworld was actively developed in "early access," some updates introduced changes to the mechanics to eliminate similarities with Pokémon games (before update v0.3.11, players could summon Pals by throwing a sphere manually). Now the developers are preparing for the release of the full version of the game 1.0 – the update is scheduled to be released on July 10.