Palworld is Taking the Gaming World by Storm

More than two years ago, the Japanese studio Pocketpair revealed Palworld by releasing a trailer. This was a game featuring survival elements, crafting, exploration, multiplayer, and a whole bunch of different-looking monsters to ride on or shoot! At the time, the game seemed intriguing as much as it looked absolutely absurd.

Jump to nearly three years later, Pocketpair announced in a trailer on January 19th, 2024, the early access release of Palworld, also known as “Pokémon with guns.” Seven million copies were sold in five days, with 1.85 million concurrent players on Steam and growing.

Palworld surpassed massive games like Counter-Strike 2, Dota 2, Cyberpunk 2077, and Elden Ring, finally taking the second place in concurrent player numbers, second only to PUBG with its 3 million concurrent player record! These are some astonishing statistics that no one could have predicted or even expected back in 2021.

According to the developer team’s official X (Twitter) account, Palworld sold 86 thousand copies an hour!

What is Palworld?

Palworld is a multiplayer, open-world survival and crafting game. In this game, you can fight, farm, build, and work alongside mysterious creatures called “Pals”. Players can construct bases alongside their Pals. Within the created base, players can assign Pals to various tasks, automating item collection, production, farming, and even electricity generation. Players can also work together with other players for shared adventures in an open-world setting.

“Pokémon with guns”

Unfortunately, with Palworld’s great success, a lot of drama ensued. There were immediately talks about the resemblance of the creatures in Palworld to Pokémon. The similarities of Palworld to Pokémon are not exactly obscure. They go beyond creature design as game play features like catching monsters by throwing items seemed to be borrowed from other games.

Gamers were not the only ones to take notice of these similarities. Nintendo is reported to be hunting and shutting down any unofficial mods bringing Pokémon into this game. Moreover, Pokémon’s former chief legal officer, Don McGowan, said about Palworld:

“This looks like the usual ripoff nonsense that I would see a thousand times a year when I was chief legal officer of Pokémon, I’m just surprised it got this far.”

Takuro Mizobe, Palworld CEO and director, said in response to plagiarism accusations:

“We have absolutely no intention of infringing upon the intellectual property of other companies”

Additionally, He has asked people to stop messaging and harassing the developer team.

However, the drama continues. a developer from Naughty Dog claimed that Palworld was created nefariously. This developer says that making a game is hard so Palworld is “cheating” somehow:

“They’re cheating somehow, I just can’t pinpoint how.”

So, the Palworld team is standing their ground, saying they didn’t copy anything. As for what’s next, we’ll just have to wait and see. Will all this drama hurt Palworld, or will it come out on top?

What’s coming?

Despite all of these controversies surrounding Palworld, there is no denying the gigantic success of this game and the popularity it has gained among gamers. And it is guaranteed to continue to do so, as Pocketpair shared the early access roadmap for the game introducing new features and improvements. This roadmap includes PvP, raid bosses and other endgame content, Steam-Xbox crossplay, bug fixes, additional features, and more.

As of now, there is no specific date for the implementation of these new features. Although with the massive surge of players booting up this game, Pocketpair states that it is focusing on improving connection issues first before moving on to other plans.

Palworld released on January 19, 2024 for Xbox Series X|S, Xbox One, Game Pass and PC via Steam and Microsoft Store as early access.