Palworld studio Pocketpair has a very simple solution for dealing with toxic players: kick them out of the game and call them losers. And just like that, all of a sudden, I want to play some Palworld.
Speaking at Game Developers Conference 2025, Palworld community manager John 'Bucky' Buckley touched on the pervasive issue of shitty people playing online games. It's something every developer behind an online game has to deal with, but even with 32 million players to manage, Bucky and Pocketpair are able to take it all in stride.
"Just kick 'em," Bucky said. "You just call 'em losers and you kick 'em. And then they post on Twitter saying, 'Bucky called me a loser,' and I'm like, 'yeah, you're a loser, dude.'"
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Bucky explained that, due to Palworld's international popularity, Pocketpair has "one or two" moderators per region and "an army" of English-speaking moderators. None of them are bots, and they're all trained to identify and boot toxic players indiscriminately.
"Really, they're just very no-nonsense. We've told them to be as strict as you want," Bucky said. "Palworld is a game that's kind of ripe for toxicity. It's a survival game and has multiplayer. It's ticking all the boxes for worst people. Mix that with the furry community, and these things do not go together. The Palworld Discord is 24/7 mayhem. So very early on, we said, look, if people are out of line, just kick them. I mean, who cares at this point? What are they doing to do?"
Despite Palworld's incredible success, I'd imagine toxic players are the least of Pocketpair's concerns. Bucky said during the same GDC panel that Nintendo's copyright lawsuit "came as a shock" to the studio because patent infringement was "something that no one even considered."
Palworld dev reckons "very few companies could survive" a launch like theirs: "A lot of companies might crumble under the threats, under the pressure, under the negativity."
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