Palworld’s PS5 port is on hold indefinitely in Japan

Sony included the PS5 launch of Palworld as one of its news items during Tuesday evening’s State of Play presentation, but it left out a detail. While the game has launched on PlayStation platforms in 68 countries and regions worldwide, Japan is not one of them.

The official Japanese account for the game said on X, according to machine translation, that the release date in Japan “has not yet been decided,” without going into detail about the reason. It certainly seems like a reason could be the patent infringement lawsuit Nintendo and The Pokémon Company filed against Palworld developer Pocketpair last week, but the tweet didn’t confirm things either way.

The most recent statement about the issue from Pocketpair is still this one from the 19th, which says, in part:

We have received notice of this lawsuit and will begin the appropriate legal proceedings and investigations into the claims of patent infringement.

At this moment, we are unaware of the specific patents we are accused of infringing upon, and we have not been notified of such details.