Pocketpair says Pokemon is a “great predecessor” to the popular Palworld

I would tolerate this game if they had made the monster designs by themselves, without borrowing (/copying) anything from the Pokémon designs. I can’t stand plagiarism.

I’m pretty sure this will just result in bigger, more detailed pokemon games. I mean I’m playing pal world atm, it feels a lot like arceus. PW has more going on, but at the same time, it’s still very similar. If pokemon introduced some kind of traininer weapons, training leveling, and base building. Then PW would instantly feel boring. But that’s all pokemon is really missing….. Unless you could capture trainers. Which is a thing PW has. It’s a fun feature, but also kind of silly.

I feel like I’m in a bizarro alternate world where some cheap knockoff game (that proudly uses AI and from a company whose CEO previously was doing NFTs) blew up. This game will be dead by year’s end by the time the gimmick has worn off.

Has me wondering how much this must be botted. I’m not even a huge fan of pokemon or anything— slimy studio all over tbh. Millions in just a couple days after zero discussion around release? Red flags all over this thing.

On day one of Early Access, warts and all, Palworld is distinctly more impressive than anything Game Freak’s released in a very long time. Even when compared to the present-day state of Legends:Arceus or Scarlet+Violet, it easily puts both to shame in terms of technical quality and polish.

These claims of anti-consumer or “slimy” behavior by the devs is likely sour grapes because the “clone” is so much more ambitious, more polished, and more technically competent than the “original”.

With regards to plagiarism: If there was any concrete truth behind the vague, nebulous claims of plagiarism floating around in Nintendo-friendly comments sections today, such evidence could be turned over to Steam or Xbox to have the game taken down in a matter of days. I sincerely doubt any such evidence exists. Even if one could argue that certain Pal designs are wholly unoriginal and inspired directly by specific Pokemon designs, that’s perfectly lawful, as it should be: inspiration is a fundamental and unavoidable input to the creative process. I’d also note that plenty of Pokemon designs across all gens are pretty generic conceptually to begin with; thankfully Game Freak can’t own the exhaustive rights to the brilliant secret formula of “animal + element = fantasy creature”.

With regards to Craftopia still being in Early Access: Time will tell whether this is actually significant, ie whether the studio can properly support both games at the same time. So far, there seems to be little evidence of Pocketpair abandoning Craftopia (which was sitting at a Very Positive rating on Steam a month ago after three years in EA), with the game having seen multiple updates and a new development roadmap released just within the last month. Regardless, this is a humorous bit of concern trolling coming from Pokemon fans considering the shameful state of Game Freak’s recent games, be it at launch or beyond.

The reality is that if Pocketpair truly wishes to rise to the level of shameless scumbaggery that Pokemon has achieved, they’ve got a very long way to go. Of course Game Freak got a few decades ahead of the curve by routinely tricking children and uninformed parents into buying two or more copies of the same game, a historical habit that’ll make it nigh-impossible for anyone to ever catch up. Even narrowing the window down to the Switch era, Pokemon already has a healthy head-start thanks to those $40 cosmetic skins in a kids game (hey, that’s $10 more than Palworld in its entirety!) and explicitly and repeatedly lying about visual improvements to justify massive and permanent reductions in core content. Good luck catching up with that.