Nintendo's litigation against Palworld developer Pocketpair is becoming increasingly complicated by the day, with one recent patent granted to the Pokemon franchise now under review by the United States.

According to a new Games Fray report, the new head of the United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO), John A. Squires, has ordered a reexamination of Nintendo’s Patent No. 12,403,397. Filed in January 2023, granted to Nintendo in September 2025, and dubbed the '397 patent, the listing is oftentimes oversimplified to "summoning characters and making them fight." It's for this reason that Squires's office is seeking to determine if such a feature is even patentable.

"I have determined that substantial new questions of patentability have arisen as to claims 1, 13, 25, and 26 of U.S. Patent No. 12,403,397 B2 (the '397 patent')," Squires wrote in his order, citing two older applications filed by Konami in 2002 (Yabe) and Nintendo in 2019 (Taura) as justification for the patent's reexamination. "Thus, a reasonable examiner would consider each of Yabe and Taura to be important in deciding whether the claims are patentable, and Yabe and Taura each raise a substantial new question of patentability. I hereby order [the] reexamination of the '397 patent."

You might think that your weapons or gear or inventory items are the most important elements of your Arc Raiders account, but the answer is, actually, your pet chicken. At the start of Arc Raiders, you'll be gifted Scrappy, a chicken that can collect resources for you while you're out killing enemies during a drop. To make Scrappy even stronger, it can be upgraded to be even better at its job.

Like all upgrades in Arc Raiders, Scrappy requires some specific resources every time you go to advance its level. If you want to progress Scrappy to level three, you'll need to acquire three lemons and three apricots. While this might sound like a trivial task, just wait until you learn how rare lemons and apricots can be in Arc Raiders.

In general, you'll be able to loot lemons and apricots on the ground at the base of trees. However, you can also kick some trees to get fruit to fall onto the ground, which you can then scoop up. Consider that a bonus addition to our Arc Raiders tips. The number of available trees during a drop wildly varies in Arc Raiders, and this includes trees that you both can and can't shake. Both lemons and apricots are "green" loot items, so they tend to stick out more than more common loot you find on the ground.

A new study has revealed its findings on the carbon footprint of physical video games, and unsurprisingly, digitally downloaded games are considered to be more environmentally friendly in comparison to physical. French carbon-accounting firm Greenly studied the environmental impact of various systems and the production of video games, finding that physical copies of games are "100 times more carbon-intensive" than their digital counterparts.

According to Greenly, the manufacturing and transportation of physical games--with 1 million discs being used as an example--could produce 312 tons of carbon dioxide, while 1 million downloads of the same game--if it were 70GB in size--would equal three tons of carbon dioxide emissions.

"Although cloud-based gaming can be detrimental as a result of its need for continuous access to energy-hungry data servers, we also cannot neglect the continued impact of manufacturing and packaging physical video games," study author Stephanie Safdie explained to GamesIndustry.biz. "Ultimately, downloading a digital copy imposes emissions linked to electricity use at home, as well as the energy use of the concerned data center--but it does not have the same impact as the emissions created by the industry in terms of landfill and excessive waste, which are primarily still accounted for by physical consoles and hard disc copies of games."

Microsoft has debuted a new advertisement for Xbox Game Pass aimed at reminding people that they don't have to wait very long to play more games. The "New Games Added All The Time" ad focuses on a sad-looking, tired person sitting inside a disc-return box waiting for someone to return a game so they can play it. This is meant to highlight how people used to rent games at places like Blockbuster but had to wait, in some cases at least, for people to return their copies.

"That was then," the ad states before cutting to the person sitting at their desk at home and booting up a game from the Game Pass library. "Now, new games are added all the time," the ad says.

Microsoft normally adds games to Game Pass across two waves each month, and there are currently more than 850 titles available to Game Pass Ultimate subscribers.