Nintendo goes after the Palworld Pokémon modder

Nintendo has finally come for Palworld… in the form of issuing a takedown for a video of a mod that swapped all the Palworld pals for pokémon. Lol.

Days after Palworld’s early access launch and cosmic-level popularity explosion, YouTube creator ToastedShoes posted a short video on X (formerly Twitter) teasing his Pokémon Palworld mod.

“Palworld already has a Pokémon mod,” ToastedShoes wrote on X. His claim was a bit misleading: according to Palworld developer Pocket Pair, the game doesn’t yet support mods, but there are plans to add mod support post-launch. How ToastedShoes made the mod or exactly how sophisticated it was is hard to say at the moment.

Either way, within hours of his X post announcing the mod, ToastedShoes posted that Nintendo had filed a claim against the video and had gotten it taken down.

“Nintendo has come for me, please leave me in your thoughts and prayers,” he posted.

However, that didn’t stop him from posting the full video of his modded Palworld experience — while getting off a few jokes at Nintendo’s expense. (Catch the full video below… while you still can.)

It’s about what you’d expect: 16 minutes of abusing pokémon, fighting them, forcing them to work, and using them to fight a nigh unwinnable battle against the game’s first boss, which was modded to look like Jessie from Team Rocket riding a gigantic Electabuzz.

Nintendo is famously litigious regarding its intellectual property rights and has a history of taking down fan-made content. Since the arrival of Palworld and the accusation that its monster designs infringe upon Nintendo’s IP, there’s growing discussion about whether Nintendo will go after Palworld’s developers. It doesn’t seem like Nintendo has filed any complaints against Palworld just yet. It’s typically far easier to take something down where there is no ambiguity regarding infringement, which is what happened with ToastedShoes. But it’s also easy to keep those things up: as of publication, ToastedShoes’ video is still available on YouTube. The YouTuber posted on X that he initially wanted to release the mod for free to everyone but now says he plans to “tread lightly” for the time being.