Palworld dev "couldn't believe" the state of publisher deals in games and wanted to be "much fairer" with devs: "The price you have to pay is someone else taking all your money for years and years"

Pocketpair Publishing, the indie publishing arm of Palworld developer Pocketpair, was largely a means of giving back to the games industry on the back of unexpected success, and it also became a way to push back on skewed contracts at a time where indies are struggling to find funding at all.

Speaking with The Game Business, Pocketpair communications and publishing head John 'Bucky' Buckley recalls how, after Palworld's meteoric launch, the studio was bombarded with pitches from folks hoping for someone, anyone to fund their game. "All of our games have basically been self-published, right? So that entire side of the industry is relatively alien to us," Buckley recalls.

"And what surprised us the most was the conditions that are normalized now in the indie publishing world," he says. "You’re meeting with these four or five-man teams who are looking for what is relatively not a lot of money. And they are very used to just giving up all of their revenue for one year. We just couldn’t believe it. You want to make this thing that you are totally in love with, and the price you have to pay is someone else taking all your money for years and years and years."

With Pocketpair Publishing, Buckley says the studio, which is "not wanting for anything at the moment" thanks to the Palworld war chest, could "afford to give indies the money they need and not take these huge revenue share agreements."

Through "much fairer deals" which don't lock developer revenue split behind recoup costs, instead letting "developers survive from sale one onwards," Pocketpair Publishing could enable more sustainable development. In other words, Pocketpair Publishing devs won't have to wait those "years and years and years" before seeing the fruits of their labor hit their bank balance.

This reflects the company's more hands-off approach to publishing, Buckley says, which sounds only slightly more involved than the indie investment fund from Among Us developer Innersloth. He says the company tries to just let developers do their thing, occasionally stepping in to "offer some advice" but never taking direct control – outside of one contract version in which Pocketpair directly handles the Asian release of a game, what with its experience in the Asia market.

“We literally just fund the game. We don’t buy out any of the company. We don’t take any of the IPs. We really are hands-off," Buckley concludes.

As it happens, Phasmophobia maker Kinetic Games just opened its own publishing arm, closely following the footsteps of Pocketpair and Innersloth.

Palworld dev isn’t impressed by "so-called" AAA, prefers indies since they "include the kind of systems you can’t find in other games": "AAA titles are overwhelmingly about graphic quality and fidelity."