In face of Nintendo lawsuit, Palworld marches onto mobile

1 month ago 57

An image of electric hedgehog pals in Palworld. There are three of them and they’re running as eletricity shoots out from them.

Image: Pocketpair

Oli Welsh is senior editor, U.K., providing news, analysis, and criticism of film, TV, and games. He has been covering the business & culture of video games for two decades.

Despite facing a patent infringement lawsuit in Japan from Nintendo and The Pokémon Company, indie developer Pocketpair is pushing ahead with capitalizing on the runaway success of its creature-collecting survival game Palworld. After surprise-launching the game on PlayStation 5 in September (everywhere but Japan), Pocketpair has entered into an agreement with Korean publisher Krafton to develop a mobile version.

Krafton announced the deal and said the new mobile version would be developed by PUBG Studios, the studio behind battle royale smash PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds. Krafton didn’t specify whether Palworld on mobile would be a straight port of the PC and console game or something different, but its statement said (via machine translation) that it “plans to faithfully reinterpret and implement the original’s main fun elements to fit the mobile environment.”

Krafton’s PUBG Mobile is a pretty close match for the original PUBG, although it pioneered the free-to-play business model that has now been retrofitted to the PC and console game. That seems a likely outcome for the mobile version of Palworld (which is a paid early access game on console and PC), too. Palworld’s biggest audience is in China, where free-to-play mobile gaming reigns supreme.

Nintendo is yet to expand its legal challenge to Palworld outside of the Japanese market. Its case hinges on a series of patent applications for gameplay mechanics in Pokémon games.