„This was a very sad day.” Hit survival game devs address Nintendo lawsuit and recall Palworld's insane launch
During a Game Developers Conference panel, the developers of Palworld recalled the game's release and talked about their reaction to the lawsuit from Nintendo.
At the ongoing Game Developers Conference, a panel was held featuring John Buckley, who is part of the Pocketpair studio, famous for Palworld. He recalled the insane early access launch of the game and discussed how the lawsuit from Nintendo affected the company.
- He stated that the atmosphere in the studio is very friendly and it helped the team to cope with many difficulties. After the release, Palworld reached a record activity level of 2.1 million players playing simultaneously on Steam. The developers' lack of preparation is best demonstrated by the fact that initially, only one employee was responsible for the servers.
- The popularity of the game shocked the creators. Originally, they assumed that it would mainly arouse interest in Japan. In truth, it turned into a worldwide sensation. The devs claim that they don't really have an idea why Palworld has achieved much greater success than the team's previous titles. As Buckley stated:
People always ask us, 'Why? What happened? How did you get so much attention?' We don't know. If we knew how to do it, we'd do it again, but we have no idea what happened.
Buckley also acknowledged that the day Nintendo sued the studio was quite disheartening, as the developers at Pocketpair are huge fans of the Pokemon series.
- The creators were also afraid of the reaction of the most hardcore Nintendo fans, so they decided to hire security guards for the office.
- Nintendo accuses the developers of Palworld of violating several patents. So far, this has only concerned Japan, but recently the corporation has also acquired one in the USA. Buckley didn't directly tackle this issue, but, notably, updates to Palworld have significantly altered several aspects of the game, seemingly to move its solutions away from the mentioned patents. For instance, Pals are no longer summoned by throwing a "pokeball" and simply appear next to the player.
Palworld was released on PC, Xbox One, and Xbox Series X/S in January 2024. Eight months later, the game also hit the PS5.
