Released on Jan. 19 of 2024, “Palworld,” a video game with collectable weapons and creatures called Pals, has quickly gained immense popularity. It sold around five million copies within its first three days and more than 25 million copies in its first month. While Palworld has been dubbed by many as “‘Pokémon’ with guns,” in truth, it is more similar to a survival game like “Minecraft.”
The viral game, which has reached the second highest concurrent player count on Steam‒a site used for the digital distribution of video games‒allows you to collect Pals. Pals are the staple of the game; they are strange creatures who work for players and perform jobs such as cooking or guarding materials. The goal of the game is to become stronger, defeat bosses, as well as explore, and this largely happens through the Pals.
A likely contributor to the game’s popularity is nostalgia. As previously mentioned, the game looks like “Pokémon.”In the short time since its release, the game has not been without controversy. Many believe that Palworld has infringed on Nintendo’s intellectual property by copying Pokémon.
These claims are unsurprising–people have been making comparisons between the two since Palworld came out. While Nintendo hasn’t taken any decisive action against Palworld itself, they did strike down the game’s only “Pokémon” mod, an external file that placed Pokémon character models(their visual in-game representation) over Pals.
Palworld has also faced accusations pertaining to the alleged use of artificial intelligence (AI) in the game’s creation. According to the Washington Post, there is no concrete evidence to support these claims. However, speculation began to solidify for many people as they dug up old tweets from the CEO of Pocketpair– the company behind Palworld – in which he expressed interest in AI. Pocketpair also sells another game which openly uses AI as a feature.
Nevertheless, in a world of video game titans, Palworld ‒ a game created by a company that reportedly has under 50 employees ‒ managed to become one of the most popular games in the world, even if only for a short while. If nothing else, Palworld has provided an immense amount of entertainment for its player base regardless of its controversy.
