The community manager behind Palworld, PockerPair, says the studio was also hit hard when Nintendo filed a lawsuit against them.

Palworld has been dubbed “Pokémon with guns” by many since its release in January 2024. At this year’s GDC, PockerPair Community Manager John Buckley spoke about how it was very popular to hate the game after its release because of its “impression-printing” effect. Buckley also responded to accusations that Palworld allegedly used generative AI. The game has also been accused of plagiarism in the past, but studio CEO Takuro Mizobe responded to that on Twitter at the time, and Buckley says that’s when PockerPair went on the offensive: the Pal Vote system was introduced, so that developers within the studio would vote on artists’ sketches and designs, and what they liked would be worked out.

“I could stand here and tell you that we didn’t use AI to create Palworld, but at least five people in this room are going to say ‘liar. But that’s the way it is. We’ve kind of given up on repeating that, but we haven’t, I promise. I think very few companies could survive a post-Palworld situation like we did. I think a lot of companies could crumble under the threats, under the pressure, under the negativity, but we managed to keep all of our people. We’ve been able to move forward because we’re such a close and tight knit company,” Buckley said.

PockerPair is also working on new features, so cross-play will come later. But what about Nintendo? The big N has filed a lawsuit against PockerPair, which was announced in September. It demanded about $33,000 in damages because the studio violated three patents. One of them was that the object called the Pal Sphere looked a lot like a Pokéball, and interestingly, the patents were filed by the big N shortly after Palworld was released. Buckley said it was a devastating day for them with Nintendo’s move, and PockerPair apologized to fans in their statement, calling the situation very unfortunate.

“We did legal checks before Palworld was released and they were all cleared in Japan. So of course when the lawsuit was announced we were like, ‘What? And we went back to the lawyers, and the lawyers contacted the courts and asked, ‘What’s going on?’ and that’s when we realized they were going after patents. Pretty much everyone at Pocketpair is a huge fan, so it was a very depressing day, everyone’s head down, walking in the rain. It changed a lot of things for us. We were just about to release the PlayStation version, we were just about to go to Tokyo Game Show, so obviously we had to scale back a little bit and hire security and stuff like that,” Buckley added.

At least they didn’t give up, and that’s honorable.

Source: PCGamer