In autumn 2025, Nintendo was granted a patent for summoning and letting creatures fight. This has now been revoked.
What is this patent?
- In September 2025, the U.S. Patent Office approved a patent from Nintendo (Patent No. 12,403,397) that concerns summoning and controlling game characters in games.
- Nintendo secured with the patent the method by which one game character summons a second game character and uses it in the event of a battle.
- The patent attracted a lot of attention because it concerns not only games like Palworld, which are in direct competition with Pokémon, but also titles like Baldur’s Gate 3, Diablo, and ARK: Survival Evolved.
- Already in November 2025, the director of the U.S. Patent Office ordered a re-examination of the patent.
The patent in question was now revoked on March 25, 2026, by the U.S. Patent Office, as reported by the online magazine games fray.
This is the authority’s decision: The Patent Office states that on November 3, 2025, it initiated a “director-initiated order for unilateral re-examination”. It was found that four of the total 26 claims of the patent raise “substantial new questions of patentability”. The Patent Office subsequently gave Nintendo 2 months to respond.
However, Nintendo did not submit a response within the deadline, which is why claims 1-26 of the patent were subjected to re-examination. The authority then stated:
- “Claims 1–26 are currently being re-examined (“Re-examined Claims”). With respect to the re-examined claims and as a result of this decision: a) Claims 1–26 are rejected under 35 USC § 103(a).”
The Patent Office bases its decision on the combinations of several references in the form of published U.S. patent applications. Two of these earlier patent applications were filed by Nintendo itself, as well as one by Konami and one by Bandai Namco.
Already in October, a Japanese authority rejected a patent application from Nintendo for capturing creatures, stating that it contained no innovative idea but only obvious combinations of already known concepts from various games. Here you can read the report from October 2025: Authority rejects Nintendo’s patent application for capturing creatures, which could influence the legal dispute with Palworld
