Developed by the previously unknown Japanese studio Pocket Pair, Palworld is a video game that achieves sales figures worthy of the largest productions: its developers claim that six million copies were sold in four days on Steam, the sales leader for dematerialized games on PC its release on January 19th. And that's just the tip of the iceberg: the game is also available in the Windows and Xbox Stores and is even accessible for free for subscribers to Microsoft's Game Pass program.
However, the team promises that development is only at an early stage and the game will be further developed based on feedback from Internet users. In return, players who benefit from an attractive price must expect an even simpler experience and bugs of all kinds – Palworld presented a certain number of them in the games played by Le Monde.
Palworld arouses great curiosity due to its concept, which has earned it the nickname “Pokémon with weapons”. It begins with a character in a loincloth waking up on an island. It's up to him to extract resources from his environment (wood, stone, ores, etc.) to expand his base, explore the environment and combat threats.
The taste of transgression
However, one thing sets it apart from the dozens of survival and building games that burst into the breach that Minecraft opened almost fifteen years ago: this one is set in a colorful universe populated by rotund creatures with elemental powers, whose design evokes strong memories of Nintendo's -Games whose mascot has become Pikachu.
But Palworld's promotional videos undermine Pokémon's typically good-natured atmosphere, with cartoon monsters holding realistically designed machine guns. We see the player ridding these adorable creatures with bullets, arrows or explosives and arming the animals they capture. Palworld is also about slavery and animal cruelty – without us knowing exactly whether it is satire or not.
Disturbing and surprising elements in a game that, when released, presented itself as “PEGI 7”, that is, according to the rating system set up by European publishers, recommended for an audience of 7 years and over. It is now reserved for an audience of players over 12 years old.
This subversion doesn't seem to have angered the huge community of Pokémon fans, and may have even attracted them. The performance of its release is also comparable to that of a real Pokémon game. In fact, at the start of 2022 6.5 million boxes of Pokémon Legends: Arceus were sold in one week. Then, in November 2022, ten million copies of Pokémon Purple and Pokémon Scarlet were sold in three days.
Pokémon fans' appetite for Palworld may be exacerbated by what is often perceived as a lack of boldness in a series that has barely evolved since its first episode, released on the Game Boy in 1996. The last titles in the series even suffered from technical problems and graphics that fell well short of current standards.
Read the review: We tested Pokémon: Scarlet and Violet, the most enchanting technical disaster
But for many observers, Palworld is not only reminiscent of Pokémon: it is a copy, at least in certain aspects. Over the past few days, players have been having fun searching for the Pokémon that inspire each of the game's 111 “Pals.”
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Adding to these visual similarities is a monster capture system very similar to that of the Nintendo game; We are therefore invited to collect them in a “Paldex”, which inevitably reminds us of the Pokémon “Pokédex”.
The connections are fueling online debates and causing some to worry about possible legal action by Nintendo over plagiarism. Asked about this issue, the company did not respond to requests from Le Monde.
A leader with a nebulous profile
The CEO of Pocket Pair, Takuro Mizobe, assured in an exchange with the specialized Japanese website Automaton that he had taken the necessary legal precautions, quoted in an article published on January 19th. Since the game's announcement, the studio's line of defense has been to fend off any attempt at comparison. “Honestly, I didn’t understand why people on the internet said they were Pokemon with weapons,” Mr. Mizobe previously defended himself in an article published in June 2021 on the American site The Gamer.
Pocket Pair's official announcement emphasizes that Palworld is a survival and building game, similar to the very popular Valheim, V-Rising or Sons of the Forest, surprise hits from 2021, 2022 and 2023.
Mr. Mizobe tirelessly reiterates that the main inspiration for Palworld was not Pokémon but Ark: Survival Evolved (2015), a survival game featuring dinosaurs. In fact, aside from the design of its monsters, it differs greatly from Pokémon in most of its gameplay mechanics, which more closely resembles the cannon of role-playing games.
The controversies surrounding Palworld are also fueled by Pocket Pair's meager liabilities (previously primarily responsible for one game, Craftopia, whose similarities to Zelda, another Nintendo series, are now highlighted) and, in particular, by the surprising profile of its CEO. Takuro Mizobe does not come from the world of video games – his only experience in the field before developing Pocket Pair seems to be his participation in a seminar organized by the brand on developing games for the Nintendo DS console in the early 2010s. The US Patent Office also maintains traces of applications from the same period filed in Nintendo's name and in which the Nintendo name appears.
Takuro Mizobe describes himself: to his account, as one of the founders of Coincheck, a cryptocurrency company where he actually 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. In 2018, Coincheck suffered a major computer attack that resulted in the theft of the equivalent of 430 million euros – an amount that Coincheck has since refunded to its customers.
However, on his company's official website, Mr. Mizobe ignores other activities. His bio does not mention his role as chief engineer of the Spindle project, a cryptocurrency investment company, a role he held according to a Japanese influencer's presentation of the project in 2018. This project presented itself as “the largest ICO” at the time [levée de fonds en cryptoactifs] of Japanese History,” but had attracted the attention of investigators from the country’s financial brigade, who believed the company was violating investment laws. She then hastily moved to London. The project has now been completed and around 16 million euros in capitalization went up in smoke.
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