Earlier this year, Palworld developer Pocketpair used its newfound success to start a publishing arm. This, I think, is generally a net good, even if I have some feelings about the studio as a whole, which we’ll dig into shortly. Nobody has money in this industry except for the few who do, so when a few of the few who do decide to put some of that money into much smaller games, that is somewhat of a win. But heed this warning from Pocketpair’s communications director and publishing manager John Buckley: they won’t publish your game if you use generative AI.
Buckley recently spoke with Game Developer, saying that he just “doesn’t believe” in AI as a technology. Worth noting is that many often accuse Pocketpair of using the stuff in Palworld, a point Buckley does acknowledge: “People are going to say I’m lying, but these are just the hard facts. We don’t believe in it. We’re very upfront about it. If you’re big on AI stuff or your game is Web3 or uses NFTs, there are lots of publishers out there [who’ll talk to you], but we’re not the right partner for that.”
Buckley does also know we’re seeing more and more games releasing on Steam that he describes as “low quality, AI-made,” but to counteract that he thinks “think we’re going to enter this kind of authenticity market where people are going to slowly say ‘no, these guys are really trying to make something special’ to fight back.”
I do think it’s worth highlighting the slight bit of irony here. The quality of Palworld notwithstanding, it is incredibly hard to argue that it doesn’t harbour similar issues that AI has. Many of the Pal designs are a regurgitation of various Pokemon designs, but worse, or even more crude, removing them from their original contexts, or assigning them new ones that don’t make much sense.
I’m not exactly thrilled that one of the poster creatures, that big yellow guy you can see up in the featured image, is essentially My Neighbour Totoro’s titular beastie but with a gatling gun, personally. Everyone knows how anti-war Hayao Miyazaki is! It genuinely is great to hear a studio like Pocketpair, which has the financial capability to back other, smaller independent games, take a stance against AI. I just also hope that they look at the tech steadily encroaching on the games industry, and think about the ways they might perpetuate its aesthetic sensibilities.
