Palworld Devs Eager to Stick to Indie Games

In a new interview with GameSpark, Pocketpair, the developer behind the popular open-world monster-taming title Palworld, says that they’ll remain in the indie sphere for the foreseeable future.

Despite Palworld making an incredible amount of money over the past eight months, CEO Takuro Mizobe of the company explains that making a triple-a game may not be the best thing for the company.

“Looking at global trends for AAA games, it’s become difficult to develop a game with a large team and ensure it becomes a hit,” Mizobe said.

“Although we don’t talk about it publicly, sales of Palworld are in the tens of billions of yen. If we were to develop our next game based on these proceeds, as we have done in the past, not only would the scale go beyond triple-a, but we wouldn’t be able to keep up with this in terms of our organization’s maturity, or better put, we aren’t structured for something like that at all.”

The CEO also doesn’t seem personally interested in making a triple-a title. “If you ask me if there’s any game I would like to make with such an enormous budget, there isn’t. I want to pursue ideas that are interesting as indie games,” he said.

After drawing in over two million players at launch, Palworld lost over 84 percent of its playerbase in its first month. With the recent release of the game’s new Sakurajima update, however, fans flocked back to the open-world creature collector, seeing a 700% increase in concurrent players on Steam in July.

Palworld was released in early access in January 2024 for PC, Xbox One, and Xbox Series X/S. As of February 2024, the game had sold over 15 million copies.