(Bloomberg) — Palworld, the year’s biggest independent gaming sensation, was created from the beginning to be a conversation starter, according to creator Takuro Mizobe.
It’s not enough for games in today’s social age to be fun to play, the 35-year-old said in an interview. Your game should be fun to watch, have multiplayer elements, and make people want to talk about it. That was the premise Mizobe started with when his small 55-person studio in Tokyo, Pocketpair, which he founded in 2015, created his Palworld.
The game’s cute companions are clearly inspired by Nintendo’s Pokémon, so they’re in line with Mizobe’s goal of sparking online chatter, but if the game were just an imitation, it wouldn’t be as much. It won’t go far. Mr. Mizobe’s team also borrowed ideas from his other hit games such as ARK: Survival Evolved, Factorio, and RimWorld when creating the game’s design and systems. The key was to balance these elements and add some intentional and unique quirks.
“In Pal World, the corpses of defeated Pals remain in the game meaninglessly,” Mizobe said. “Typically, when you kill a monster or enemy, they remain until they disappear or are looted. My colleagues were against leaving useless bodies in the game, but I don’t think it’s possible for players to play with them or discuss them.” I thought I would find a way to do it, so I pushed through.”
There’s a certain humor to this game’s splicing of genres, which is immediately apparent in its succinct description: “Pokémon with guns.” Combining gameplay from different genres usually tends to create inconsistencies that detract from the enjoyment of the game, but Pocketpair has a habit of incorporating the most popular genres and trends in his three games to date, and he Mr. Mizobe said that he has turned this into a strength.
None of Pocketpair’s early games could have prepared the studio for the phenomenal success of Palworld. This $30 title helped him sign up more than 25 million players in just one month, making it one of his fastest debuts in industry history and joining Microsoft’s Xbox Game Pass subscription service. It was a big hit.
Cartoon-like monsters called Pals appear in a photorealistic environment. Mizobe said this unusual combination of art was a happy coincidence. The team started with anime-style creatures in Unity Technologies Inc.’s asset store, then moved to Epic Games Inc.’s Unreal Engine, where most of the visuals were made realistic. The studio chief said blending the two seamlessly was one of the most difficult parts of game development, and the end result was a mix of fresh visuals that players weren’t used to. I did.
For now, Pocketpair remains an independent studio, content to maintain the intimacy of its small team. Mizobe said the company is in talks to bring his Palworld to more platforms beyond Steam and Game Pass, and is open to considering partnership and acquisition offers. However, the company is not in acquisition negotiations with Microsoft.
“We are and always will be a small studio,” he said. “We want to make multiple small games. Triple-A games with big budgets aren’t for us.”
Mizobe, CEO and overall owner of the company, believes that small studios are the greatest pioneers in game design.
“Palworld” cost less than 1 billion yen ($6.7 million) to produce and returned tens of billions of yen in profits, which Mizobe says is “too large for a studio of our size to handle.” he said. The CEO, who previously worked as a technology engineer at JPMorgan, said the company is not planning to spend a lot of money to hire more people or make its offices more luxurious. Mr. Mizobe has no plans to sell Pocket Pair’s shares on the public market.
The CEO isn’t confident that Pocketpair can develop a game as wildly popular as Palworld, which at one point had more than 2 million people playing simultaneously and rivaled some of the biggest and best titles on PC. However, he is confident of a winning strategy for today’s match.
“Games are most fun when you play with friends,” Mizobe says. “A game without a multiplayer mode doesn’t seem appropriate for the times we live in today.”
©2024 Bloomberg LP
