Palworld surprised the gaming industry when it launched in January 2024 and instantly became a huge hit on both PC, via Steam, and on the Xbox platform. In February, one month after its launch, the game's Japanese developer PocketPair announced it had already been played by 25 million people.
With this huge success, you might expect PocketPair to announce plans to hire more people and expand to release bigger and more expensive games. However, in an interview with Bloomberg this week, the developer's founder and CEO, Takuro Mizobe, stated that while Palworld has already earned far more than its $6.7 million budget, he does not plan on hiring many more team members, move the company into higher-end offices, or have it become a publically traded company.
PocketPair currently has 55 employees, according to Bloomberg. In the interview, Mizobe said:
“We are and will remain a small studio,” he said. “I want to make multiple small games. Big-budget triple-A games are not for us.”
Mizobe added that he would be open to partnerships with other companies or even an acquisition. However, he stated that he has not entered into any acquisition talks with Microsoft. The Xbox division has indeed benefited from Palworld's launch. It was a Day One release for the Xbox Game Pass service and became the biggest third-party game launch in its history.
While Palworld's current online player numbers on Steam are well below its peak of over 2 million concurrent gamers, it remains in the top 10 on Valve's service with over 120,000 players online. According to Mizobe, the Xbox version had 10 million players, but there's no word on its concurrent player numbers.
Bloomberg's story does not mention that The Pokémon Company might be looking into Palworld to see if the game has violated any of its copyrights with the designs of its "Pals" characters.
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