Palworld devs in talks to expand to other platforms, open for acquisition
It’s been a while since Palworld, the mega hit from the beginning of 2024, has been in the news – and as is often the case, the return comes with not just a single headline. Developer Pocketpair earlier today announced the first raid and brand-new Pal coming to Palworld and Takuro Mizobe, the studio’s CEO, gave a short interview to Bloomberg, in which he revealed that Pocketpair is currently in talks about bringing Palworld to additional platforms beside PC and Xbox Series X|S.
What’s more, the CEO stated that the company was open to a partnership or even acquisition. He denied that there was an ongoing conversation with Microsoft, though.
Palworld's visuals combine anime aesthetics with authentic environments.
Pocketpair
Since Palworld was such a huge hit for Xbox Game Pass and Microsoft very publicly offered its assistance to Pocketpair to overcome initial server troubles and speed up the update process of the game on Xbox One and Xbox Series X|S, observers naturally speculated that Microsoft may want an even more direct connection with the Japanese indie studio.
For the time being, Takuro Mizobe seemingly doesn’t want anything to change: He wants to stay away from making triple-A games and instead continue to focus on smaller projects. According to the interview, Palworld cost a mere $6.7 million USD to develop, so the profit from sales has been immense – almost too much to handle, the CEO admitted. Despite the influx of capital, he doesn’t want to expand Pocketpair and add new offices or staff. His word is what counts at the studio, since Pocketpair is wholly owned by its CEO.
Palworld has reached more than 25 million players since launching into Early Access via Steam and Xbox Game Pass earlier this year, making it a phenomenal success. Fusing elements of the survival crafting and creature collection genres into a co-op game proved to be a winning recipe, though especially the second part of that formula earned the title some initial skepticism – many Nintendo fans questioned the legality of Palworld’s creature designs, going so far as to accuse the developers of asset theft without having any convincing evidence to back up these claims.
The Pokémon Company even saw itself forced to make a public statement, in which it said it’d look into the matter and asked people to stop sending inquiries about the situation.
