USPTO Director Squires orders rare Director-initiated ex parte reexamination of Nintendo patent, indirectly as result of games fray article

Context: All of the policy decisions United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) Director John A. Squires has made since taking office have made it harder to challenge patents (October 16, 2025 ip fray article; October 1, 2025 ip fray article). The first time he intervened with respect to a particular patent, he actually revived a canceled patent (October 5, 2025 ip fray article), declaring expert testimony unreliable. But at his confirmation hearing in the Senate he made it clear that he simply wants U.S. patents to be “born strong” and, therefore, truly valuable.

What’s new: Yesterday (November 3, 2025), Director Squires entered a Director Initiated Order for Ex Parte Reexamination of  Nintendo’s U.S. Patent No. 12,403,397 because he identified substantial new questions for patentability based on two prior art references (an old patent application by video game maker Konami and a more recent one by nintendo itself). The patent had been the subject of intense debate in video games-specialized media because it govers a fundamental game mechanic.

Direct impact: It will be hard for Nintendo to defend this patent, and even more so if third parties seize this opportunity to submit additional prior art, of which there is plenty in the form of games that were published before the priority date.

Wider ramifications:

• There is an indirect connection with the highest-profile patent infringement lawsuit to date, which Nintendo brought in Japan against Pocketpair, a small game maker who makes the wildly popular Palworld game. Nintendo’s patents-in-suit cover nothing but games rules (May 11, 2025 ip fray article). Essentially the same game mechanic as the one covered by the U.S. ‘397 patent is among the ones at issue in the Japanese case. Last month, the Japan Patent Office (JPO) rejected a Nintendo application that is also indirectly related to that litigation (October 29, 2025 games fray article). The infringement case will be decided next year by well-known ( in patent circles) Presiding Judge Motoyuki Nakashima.
• Director Squires demonstrates that he wants to weed out bad patents. This appears to be the first Director Initiated Order for Ex Parte Reexamination since 2012.
• Given that there is no third-party challenge, the sole plausible explanation for the USPTO chief’s initiative is the media outrage that started with an article by games fray (one of ip fray‘s two sibling sites), which was picked up by the games press.