Pokémon With Guns Takes Over Steam, Might Be Plagiarized
Palworld is the biggest PC game of 2024 so far, and its most controversial
Palworld is a new survival game where players collect resources and enslave creatures in an effort to build out a sprawling factory that will let them collect even more resources and creatures. You can shoot the creatures with guns or force them into your factory to make more guns for you until they die. It’s basically a Pokémon sweatshop simulator, and it’s currently the biggest game on Valve’s PC storefront Steam.
It looks like a combination of Fortnite (and was made in Epic Games’ Unreal Engine). It plays like Ark: Survival Evovled and Valheim. It seems wholly unoriginal but is surprisingly compelling. No one can decide if its an innovative new indie hit or a cynical copy-paste job that threatens to normalize the barrage of AI-generated asset-flip junk likely coming down the road. The only thing everyone agrees on is that no one expected to be spending late January dissecting a game where you can feed Pokémon to themselves while they mine rock for you. The game’s use of the survival genre’s hyper-transactional violence to form a Black Mirror parody of the hit Nintendo games is clearly part of the appeal.
Palworld came out in Early Access on January 19 on PC and has already sold over 4 million copies. The top-selling and most-played game on Steam at the moment, it’s the work of a little known Japanese studio called Pocketpair. “Bringing super disruptive innovation to the game industry,” reads a translation of its Steam page bio. Pocketpair’s previous games include 2019's seemingly well-received roguelike deckbuilder Overdungeon and the much less received 2022 party game AI: Art Impostor. Then there was 2020’s Craftopia, a multiplayer crafting survival sim that looks to basically have been the blue print for Palworld. It was just missing one crucial ingredient: Pokémon.
The most surprising thing about Palworld is just how fast it’s exploded. Most Steam hits take time for good user reviews and word of mouth to spread. Palworld, with only a few viral marketing beats throughout development, seemed to start breaking records site unseen. Perhaps there’s some dark, nefarious magic propelling Palworld up the charts, including the penchant for online algorithms to manufacture or artificially inflate social and cultural trends. Or maybe it’s just mid-January and there’s just nothing else to play at the moment.
Palworld’s rapid growth in players reportedly spurred “emergency” meetings at Epic to maintain access for everyone flooding the game’s servers through the Epic Games Store. The game’s steady three-day climb took it past Baldur's Gate 3, Apex Legends, PUBG, Dota 2, and Counter-Strike, and it now sits at number three in all-time peak concurrents on Steam. That meteoric-rise coupled with the game’s obvious plagiarism of Pokémon has also prompted a huge backlash, at least in the conversation around Palworld and its success.
On January 19, game developer and artists Invertex tweeted a compilation of screenshots of Pocketpair CEO Takuro Mizobe enthusiastically talking about AI-generated art, Midjourney, and the technology’s prospects for improving worker productivity or replacing them altogether. Mizobe also claims to be a founder of the Bitcoin wallet Coincheck, and in the past appeared to float the idea of putting NFTs into Craftopia. Combined with the fact that Palworld does use tons of designs that appear copied directly from Game Freak’s Pokémon series, its cast a cloud of suspicion over Palworld and the studio behind it, with some calling on players to boycott the game and support more original, bespoke indie riffs on creature-collecting instead.
But it’s clear Palworld isn’t just a some high-level AI-driven Steam heist conning players out of their time and money. I’ve played several hours on PC and Xbox where a more limited version of it is on Game Pass and it’s compulsively playable. Yes, the fact that Pokémon-like creatures are roaming around the world immediately adds a jolt of excitement that wouldn’t be there if you were simply punching trees for wood to build a shelter.
But it’s not just that they look like Pokémon that keeps you from immediately bouncing off Palworld. It’s also the streamlined opening area, how balanced progression feels, and the appeal of using the things you catch to do the work of playing the game for you. This is where the Pokémon capitalism comes into play. No only are there dozens of mysterious creatures to capture, train and learn about. There’s also dozens of pain points in the game’s resource economy where you can insert them to grease the gears of technological advancement.
Dinga Bakaba, Arkane Lyon's co-creative director, shared his own thoughts on why he thinks the game is a surprise hit. “Gamewise, a shocking thing is no one is talking about is compared to Ark, Valheim etc. how approachable it is. ,” he tweeted. “Anecdata: for 2 of the friends, I'm playing with it's their very first survival game and one is VERY casual, but in a couple of hours we were all having a lot of fun.”
Bakaba continued:
As a game designer, I'm baffled that some say this is lazy. Even if you copy an idea from another game you can just copy/paste it. Even doing a sequel to your own game with the same programmer in a new engine, it takes crazy amount of time to develop a viable V2.0 of a mechanic. And this new element (mechanic, art concept etc.) now has to work together with a ton of other new things. Catching a creature to use it in combat exists in pokemon (and SMT, and Xenoblade C...), base building exists in Ark (and Fallout4 and Fortnite STW...) but making sure it plays well together, the specifics of the 3C, feedback, balancing etc. makes it that taking two things and smashing them together *in a way that works* AND is approachable to mainstream players is not an easy feat. If only for that I take offence in "lazy" being thrown out.
On January 22, Pocketpair CEO Mizobe pushed back on criticism of Palworld’s relying on stolen work, claiming his artists were no receiving death threats. “Currently, we are receiving slanderous comments against our artists, and we are seeing tweets that appear to be death threats,” he tweeted, based on a translation of the remarks. “I have received a variety of opinions regarding Palworld, but all productions related to Palworld are supervised by multiple people, including myself, and I am responsible for the production. I would appreciate it if you would refrain from slandering the artists involved in Palworld.”
But the charges of plagiarism aren’t going away. The latest accusations are that Palworld doesn’t just use similar designs, but may have in fact copied the underlying models directly from Pokémon. VGC reported on model animations making the rounds on Twitter that appear to show much deeper similarities, with some artists the website spoke to claiming the proportions are almost identical, a result you’d never get by accident. “You cannot, in any way, accidentally get the same proportions on multiple models from another game without ripping the models,” one told VGC.
If it is the case that Palworld is using underlying work stolen from Game Freak, it’s hard not to see Nintendo’s infamously litigious lawyers not sending Steam a complain, which would in turn remove the game from its store until the legal matter is resolved in court. Not that that would mean much for the 4 million who have already bought the game and started playing it.
Mizobe even said a few years ago that he does not align with Nintendo’s philosophy of always trying to create games around new and original games. “On the other hand, I have a deep-rooted desire for my work to be enjoyed by as many people as possible, so if there are good ideas out there, I pick them up, and I don't necessarily have to be particular about originality,” He told Wired in 2022 (via Jon Cartwright). “I'm thinking about it. I want to make it more casually, or rather, I want to make it more casually. I think it would be a good idea to create things in a way that just jumps on what is trendy (lol).”
“Lol” indeed! Palworld already has an un-official Nintendo mod that adds Ash, Pikachu, and the rest of the crew.