It's not often that a wholly-new IP appears out of nowhere and takes the gaming world by storm— especially not without being Free To Play— but Pocketpair's Palworld has achieved just that. Launched onto Steam Early Access on January 19th, 2024, Palworld serves as the year's first majorly-successful new launch, and has topped Steam's Most Played Games as of January 22nd, 2024.
This means that it only took three days for Palworld to net more players than Valve's own Counter-Strike 2 and Dota 2, as well as mainstays from other devs like PUBG: Battlegrounds, Apex Legends, and Grand Theft Auto V. Sorry, Baldur's Gate 3: you aren't Top 8 anymore. There's a new dominant PC RPG in town, and it carries an odd sense of familiarity.
Considering that the majority of Steam's Most Played Games are either Free To Play or belong to major franchises in their own right, this is an incredibly impressive feat on developer Pocketpair's part. However, this meteoric rise is also being met with considerable controversy, and anyone familiar with the Pokemon franchise can probably see why.
To say that Palworld's "Pal" designs are inspired by Pokémon might just be an understatement. While the severity of parallels to certain Pokémon designs can vary, a number of Pals have been called plagiarized designs. There is even speculation that aspects of the game (concept art, models, etc) were made with generative AI, though Pocketpair themselves denies the allegations of AI-assisted game development.
While this game may initially present as a soulless cash grab at Pokémon's audience by a relatively unknown new developer, it's worth noting that Palworld is fairly technically competent.
While the game is still missing some key features (like key rebinding), it's much more ambitious with its graphical and online multiplayer features than the series it's supposedly plagiarizing. Its widely-successful multiplatform launch may have something to do with its own merits, like 4-player Co-Op (alongside 32-player servers and 20-player guilds) and Ark-esque survival gameplay.
Will Nintendo take action on Palworld? It's hard to say, but Nintendo can be notoriously litigation-happy, even to its own fans. Between Palworld's successful release and confirmation of the first functional Switch flash cart in the same week, someone at Nintendo can't be very happy right now.
