Palworld is finally on PS5 in Japan despite Nintendo lawsuit

Players in Japan can finally check out Palworld on PlayStation 5 after around a week and a half after it became available elsewhere.

The official Palworld X (formerly Twitter) account announced Friday that the open-world survival game is now available on the console in Japan. This is despite the fact that developer Pocketpair has been sued by Nintendo in a Tokyo court for patent infringement.

The account apologized for the delay, but didn’t provide an explanation. It then went on to reiterate that it’ll continue to bring big updates to the PS5 version in the future.

The game launched into early access on PC via Steam, Xbox Series X/S, and Xbox Game Pass in January, and became a hit very quickly thanks to its combination of familiar monster-catching gameplay, base building, and crafting, along with its vibrant, cheery art style. It would be months before Palworld would become available to PlayStation players (all we need now is a Nintendo Switch release).

Pocketpair kept quiet on the possibility of a PlayStation version, although a Palworld community manager teased an eventual release in June with a couple blue hearts.

The PS5 version surprise-dropped on September 24 for $30 on the PlayStation Store following an appearance at the Tokyo Game Show. At the time of this writing, it’s the third bes-selling new game on the console behind EA Sprots FC 25 and Warhammer 40,000: Space Marine 2, as listed in the store’s catalog when you sort the offerings by popularity.

It was also announced earlier this week that Pocketpair will be working with PUBG: Battlegrounds studio Krafton on a mobile version of the game, although it’s still in the early stages of development.

Palworld‘s PS5 launch has been overshadowed by Nintendo’s recent filing on September 19, which claims that Pocketpair had infringed on “multiple patent rights,” although it didn’t reveal which ones. The smaller studio issued a statement a few hours late claiming it didn’t know which patents it had allegedly infringed on. However, many have speculated it has something to do with a patent filed by Nintendo and The Pokémon Company for “a video game character throwing an item to catch a monster while out in field” like in Pokémon Legends: Arceus.