Palworld Game Dev Says It’s Actually Making Too Much Money Off Its Smash Hit
The game cost less than 1 billion JPY ($6.7 million USD) to make, yet it has apparently turned in "tens of billions" of Japanese yen in profit. That's a serious pile of cash for a studio of just 55 people, and it's apparently causing a lot of anxiety over at Pocketpair. Speaking to Bloomberg, founder and CEO of Pocketpair Takuro Mizobe says that the profits of Palworld are "too big for a studio of our size to handle."
That's a curious statement, but it's not hard to understand if you think about it from the perspective of a tiny game developer thrust into the limelight by unexpected success. The game's millions of fans (among which I counts himself) are looking forward to big updates for the title, but a tiny studio like Pocketpair isn't going to be able to produce giant content updates at a rapid pace.
In fact, nearly two months on from release, Palworld has just now announced its first actual content update. It'll be a massive raid battle against a new legendary Pal known as Bellanoir, pictured at the top of this post. While parts of the community are getting real weird about Bellanoir, the rest of the fandom is arguably more excited about major quality of life improvements coming to the game in the same update, including the ability to manage the work responsibilities of your pals in a detailed fashion, as seen below:
Perhaps the biggest news to come out of the Bloomberg interview is that Pocketpair is in talks to bring Palworld to more platforms. A PlayStation release seems pretty likely, but it's also possible that we'll see the game on the Epic Games Store, or maybe even a Nintendo system. It'd be a pretty tight fit on the current Switch, but it could make for a heck of a launch title for a next-gen Nintendo machine.
According to Mizobe, Pocketpair isn't going to go public, and the company isn't even going to hire much more staff, something many people expected after the popularity of Palworld exploded. Instead, Pocketpair's CEO says that the company is content to remain an independent studio and keep making smaller games, though he's also open to consider "offers for partnership or acquisition". Despite that, Bloomberg notes that he quickly shot down the idea that Pocketpair is already in talks with Microsoft. Here's hoping the Bellanoir raid update goes well.
