Pokémon with guns? All the latest on viral gaming hit Palworld

Pocketpair is getting into the games publishing business. The company has announced that it’s taking the gobs of money it made after launching Palworld, the Steam-record busting, 15-million-copies-sold-in-its-first-month, monster-catching adventure game, to establish Pocketpair Publishing.

“Pocketpair Publishing provides comprehensive support for game development through funding, development assistance, and publishing for indie game developers and small studios,” Pocketpair wrote in its press release.

Pocketpair isn’t letting a major lawsuit slow it down. The developer has announced that its Pokémon-like hit Palworld is getting a big update in December, which will add a new island to the game. It’s described as the “largest, harshest, and most mysterious” location in the game, measuring around six times the size of Sakurajima, an island that was added in a summer update.

Aside from the new location, there aren’t many other details about the forthcoming update. But the announcement comes amid a surge in news for the game, which became a viral sensation at the beginning of 2024. In 2025, Palworld will be getting some kind of crossover with the survival crafting game Terraria, and a mobile version is also in the works, helmed by PUBG developer Krafton.

Palworld developer Pocketpair has revealed the patents at the center of the infringement lawsuit Nintendo and The Pokémon Company filed in Japan back in September. Pocketpair has also shared that, in addition to 5 million yen each plus late fees, they’re “seeking an injunction against the game and compensation for a portion of the damages incurred between the date of registration of the patents and the date of filing of this lawsuit.

The Pokémon Company cites three Japanese patents, No. 7545191, No. 7493117, and No. 7528390. From the translation of the claims, they appear to describe Pokémon-style activities, with ‘191 focused on the act of throwing a ball at characters in a field, ‘117 tied to aiming, and ‘390 on riding characters. We’ll have to dig more deeply into the original Japanese patent language and Japanese patent law to understand how strong these patents might be in the lawsuit, however.

Palworld developer Pocketpair may be facing a lawsuit from Nintendo, but that’s not stopping it from pursuing a mobile version of the game. On Wednesday, Krafton — the publisher behind PUBG: Battlegrounds — announced that it acquired the license for Palworld and will optimize it for mobile gaming, as reported earlier by Polygon.

According to a translated version of the post, Krafton says it aims to “faithfully reinterpret” Palworld’s “main fun elements to fit the mobile environment.” Krafton also created a mobile version of PUBG in 2018, and as The Verge pointed out at the time, it turned out better than expected.

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.

Pocketpair has responded to the lawsuit filed against it by Nintendo and The Pokémon Company. The studio that developed Palworld, the game at the heart of the suit, issued a statement early this morning saying it doesn’t know what patents it violated.

“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,” the statement read.

Nintendo and The Pokémon Company have filed a patent infringement lawsuit against Pocketpair, which makes the game Palworld.

From Nintendo’s press release:

Surprise viral gaming hit Palworld continues to reach new player milestones. Today, developer Pocketpair announced that the game has sold 12 million copies on Steam and reached 7 million players on Xbox. The Xbox number includes both sales and those who played via Game Pass, but the breakdown between the two isn’t clear.

According to Microsoft, though, these numbers make Palworld the biggest third-party (i.e. a game not made by an internal Microsoft studio) launch in Game Pass history. The company says it “recently” reached a “peak of nearly 3 million daily active users on Xbox, making it the most-played game on our platforms at that time.” (Which date that took place isn’t specified.)

You can all stop calling now — The Pokémon Company’s lawyers are on the case. In a statement posted on the company’s website, The Pokémon Company says it’s aware of a “game released in January 2024” and plans to “take appropriate measures to address any acts that infringe on intellectual property rights related to the Pokémon.”

It’s no secret that the game referred to is Palworld, a surprise hit juggernaut that’s slowly climbing up the Steam charts, well on its way to beating PUBG’s all-time peak player count of 3.2 million. It’s sold 8 million copies on Steam as of today, and its developer, Pocketpair, just released a roadmap laying out plans for the game’s future.

Palworld, a new multiplayer monster-collecting survival game, has sold more than 7 million copies in just five days, and now the developers behind it are sharing a roadmap of what’s to come. Dubbed “Pokémon with guns” by many, Palworld is set to get player-vs-player (PvP) fights, raid bosses, a PvP arena mode, and Steam / Xbox crossplay support.

Developer Pocketpair revealed the planned future updates in a post on X (formerly Twitter) today with no time frame for when they will arrive. Palworld is also getting “various Xbox feature improvements,” alongside server transfers and migrations, improvements to the game’s building system, and new islands, pals, bosses, and technologies.

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.

If you’re not one of the now 6 million players who’ve bought a copy of the game, here’s a quick explainer. Palworld is a multiplayer survival crafting game in which you use cute monsters called pals to harvest resources and build structures. Oh, and there are guns — you can shoot the pals with guns.

It seems like everyone on Earth is either talking about or playing Palworld. Indeed, in the three days since its early access launch on Steam on January 19th (and simultaneous release on Game Pass), the game has sold over 5 million copies. While that’s not quite Tears of the Kingdom numbers, to have a game from a relatively unknown developer do that kind of work in that short of time? Okay, Palworld, you have our attention. Let’s see exactly what it is you have to say.

Palworld’s announcement trailer released in 2021. It started generally enough, with a bright, colorful world populated with cute monsters that bear an almost uncomfortable resemblance to another game featuring cute, catchable creatures. But then come the AK-47s. Midway through the game’s trailer, the tone shifts from “catch these cute monsters that will help you build your home” to “shoot these cute monsters and use them as slave labor.” One of the most memorable moments from that first trailer was the image of a bunch of pals (the monsters are called pals) that look startlingly like Sprigatito, mournfully manufacturing assault rifles on an assembly line.