Palworld has honestly lived, and thrived, a lot longer than I honestly expected to. I guess the people really do want Pokemon with guns! As since its launch two years ago (ignore the coffee I’ve spat over my screen at that passage of time), there have been announcements for spin-offs in the form of Stardew Valley if it were Pokemon but actually it’s Palworld, a dating sim that started as a joke but will now be real, and more recently, a card game. Despite all of that expansion, however, developer Pocketpair say they have “no desire to be a media empire.”
This comes from an interview between GamesRadar and the studio’s head of publishing and communications John Buckley, who tried to dissuade the idea that they’re “trying to turn Palworld into this big, big, big, big, big, big thing.” Buckley says that for Pocketpair, “it’s more so that we’re just kind of doing what our players are asking us to do.” When it comes to games like Palworld: Palfarm, these exist because a lot of people just wanted to interact with the original game’s Pals in a slightly friendlier environment. “We can’t do that in Palworld. There’s no way to really make this work,” Buckley said.
Palworld: More Than Just Pals, the dating sim, was born similarly: “I won’t talk much about it but there is, again, a huge community who wants something like that, and that’s why we kind of spun that up.” Buckley apparently noted that much the same could be said of the trading card game and mobile spinoff, discussing how making these games that enough people want will make them happy, and “that’s, at the end of the day, all Pocketpair wants to do is just make its fans happy, right? Same with the phone game, same with all the things we’re working on.”
He continued, “Personally, I don’t think Palworld is going to be like this media empire, and we have no desire to be a media empire. But I think we can expect more kind of fun little Palworld stuff. And maybe, you know, if someone wants to, maybe someone else can take a stab at it at some point.”
I am going to give Buckley the benefit of the doubt here and make an assumption that he’s talking about this in relation to the game’s biggest source of inspiration, Pokemon, which obviously is an entire media empire in its own right. Palworld will likely never be that big, unless it does survive thirty whole years, but I do think that having so many spin-offs and a plethora of crossovers does kind of undercut some of these comments. If we ever see an animated show, I think we’ll just have to strike these comments from the record.
