Developed by the previously obscure Japanese studio Pocket Pair, Palworld is a video game that has achieved sales figures comparable to the biggest productions. Its creators announced that six million copies sold in four days on Steam, the leader in PC dematerialized game sales, since its release on January 19. And that's just the tip of the iceberg: The game is also available on the Windows and Xbox stores, and even accessible free of charge to subscribers to Microsoft's Game Pass program.
However, the team promises that development is still in its early stages and that the game will continue to evolve in response to feedback from internet users. In return for its attractive price tag, players should still expect a basic gaming experience and various bugs. Le Monde observed a number of these issues during gameplay sessions of Palworld.
Palworld arouses a great deal of curiosity due to its concept, which has earned it the nickname "Pokémon with guns." It begins with a character in a loincloth who wakes up on an island. It's up to him to extract resources from his environment (wood, stone and ore) to develop his base, explore the surrounding area and combat threats.
However, there is one thing that sets it apart from the dozens of survival and construction games that have followed in the footsteps of Minecraft, almost 15 years ago: It takes place in a colorful universe populated by pudgy creatures endowed with elemental powers, whose design is very reminiscent of the Nintendo games for which Pikachu has become the mascot.
But Palworld's promotional videos subvert Pokémon's typical good-natured atmosphere, with cartoon monsters holding realistically designed machine guns. The player is shown riddling these adorable creatures with bullets, arrows or explosives, and arming the ones he has captured. Palworld also deals with slavery and animal cruelty, although it's unclear whether or not this is satire.
These disturbing elements are surprising in a game that presented itself at launch as PEGI 7, in other words, according to the rating system set up by publishers in Europe, advised for an audience of seven years or older. It is now presented as reserved for an audience of players over 12.
This subversion doesn't seem to have angered the huge community of Pokémon fans, and may even have attracted them. In fact, its launch performance is comparable to that of a real Pokémon game. Indeed, in early 2022, 6.5 million copies of Pokémon Legends: Arceus were sold in one week. Then in November 2022, 10 million copies of Pokémon Violet and Pokémon Scarlet were sold in three days.
Pokémon fans' appetite for Palworld could even be heightened by what is often perceived as a lack of daring from a series that has hardly evolved since its first episode, released in 1996 on Game Boy. The last titles in the series even suffered from technical problems and graphics that lagged far behind today's standards.
But for many observers, Palworld isn't just reminiscent of Pokémon: In some respects at least, it's a carbon copy. Over the past few days, players have been having fun trying to figure out which Pokémon each of the game's 111 "Pals" was inspired by. In addition to these visual similarities, the system for capturing monsters is very similar to that of Nintendo's game, and players are invited to collect monsters in a "Paldex" that is necessarily reminiscent of Pokémon's "Pokédex." The similarities have sparked debate online, prompting some to wonder whether Nintendo might take legal action for plagiarism. When questioned on the subject, the company did not respond to Le Monde's inquiries.
Pocket Pair CEO Takuro Mizobe assured us that he has taken the necessary legal precautions, in an exchange with Japanese specialist site Automaton, quoted in an article published on January 19. Since the game's announcement, the studio's line of defense has been to brush aside any attempt at comparison. "Frankly, I didn't understand why people on the internet were saying it was Pokémon with guns," said Mizobe in an article published by the American site The Gamer in June 2021.
Pocket Pair's official communication insists that Palworld is a survival and construction game, like the very popular Valheim, V-Rising or Sons of the Forest, surprise hits of 2021, 2022 and 2023. Mizobe tirelessly repeats that Palworld's major inspiration is not Pokémon but Ark: Survival Evolved (2015), a survival game with dinosaurs. In fact, beyond the design of its monsters, it is very different in most of its mechanics from Pokémon, which is closer to the role-playing canon.
The controversies surrounding Palworld are also fueled by Pocket Pair's meager track record (up to now it has essentially been responsible for one game, Craftopia, whose similarities to Zelda, another Nintendo series, are now being pointed out) and above all by the astonishing profile of its CEO. Mizobe does not come from the world of video games – his only experience in the field, prior to the creation of Pocket Pair, seems to be his participation in a seminar on game creation for Nintendo DS systems organized by the brand in the early 2010s. The US Patent Office also keeps records of patent applications from the same period, filed in Nintendo's name and in which his name appears.
Mizobe describes himself, on his X account, as one of the founders of Coincheck, a company in the cryptocurrency field, where he held an executive position according to an internal company document. Founded in 2014, this crypto exchange platform was presented at the time as a symbol of the sector's growth in Japan. Coincheck suffered a major cyber attack in 2018 that led to the theft of the equivalent of €430 million – a sum that Coincheck has since refunded to its customers.
On his company's official website, however, Mizobe glosses over other activities. His biography makes no mention of his role as chief engineer of Project Spindle, a cryptocurrency investment company, a role he occupied in 2018 according to a presentation of the project undertaken by a Japanese influencer. The project presented itself at the time as having achieved "the largest ICO [cryptoasset fundraising] in Japanese history," but had attracted the attention of investigators from the country's financial brigade, who believed the company was breaking investment laws. The company then hurriedly moved to London. The project has since been shut down and around €16 million of capitalization has gone up in smoke.
Translation of an original article published in French on lemonde.fr; the publisher may only be liable for the French version.