Yes, the Nintendo lawsuit against Palworld devs is about throwing Poke Balls

digitaltrends.com:

We finally know the patents at the center of a massive Nintendo lawsuit against Palworld maker Pocketpair, and they refer to patents specific to the Pokémon games.

When Nintendo announced that it had filed a lawsuit against Pocketpair over Palworld — aka “Pokémon with guns” — it did not reveal which patents were allegedly being infringed upon, and Pocketpair said it didn’t know either. However, there were some good educated guesses, like one that pertained to throwing a Poké Ball at a creature in a virtual world.

Pocketpair confirmed in a statement on Friday that there are three patents at the center of the lawsuit. Two are tied to this idea of throwing a Poké Ball and how that works in a video game, and one concerns another mechanic. These patents were all filed in Japan, but correspond to similar patents filed in the U.S. over the past few years.

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• The Pokémon Company is investigating Palworld after plagiarism suspicions

To sum it all up, Nintendo and The Pokémon Company are suing Pocketpair over its system whereby a player throws an object in a virtual game world in a certain direction at a “battle character.” There’s also a patent listed for the technical aspects behind transitioning from riding a board or other object to walking on the ground. This latter one can refer to the bikes in Pokémon games but, as it shows in the patent, it may pertain to riding a Pokémon.

Here are summaries and links to the patents if you’re interested in the full details:

• Patent No. 7545191
  • Determining, in a first mode, an aiming direction in a virtual space based on a second operation input, and causing, in a second mode, a player character to shoot, in the aiming direction, an item that affects a field character placed on a field in the virtual space based on a third operation input. Based on the second operation input, the aiming