Palworld lead shoots down legal concerns following Pokemon comparisons: "We have absolutely no intention of infringing upon the intellectual property of other companies"

Since Palworld arrived on the scene, the Pokemon comparisons have come thick and fast, but the developer isn't worried about any legal fallout.  

Palworld has been a runaway success for developer Pocketpair, selling two million copies in a single day across PC and Xbox, and clocking up over 1,000,000 concurrent players on Steam. In it, players collect and raise cute creatures called Pals, which, in addition to battling by your side, can help you gather resources, construct buildings, and tend to your crops. But while the skillset of these pocket monsters is more diverse than those found in the Pokemon series, their designs have earned Palworld the nickname 'Pokemon with Guns' and also raised concerns over potential copyright infringement.

PocketPair's CEO Takuro Mizobe touches on this topic in an interview with Automation and moves to quell concerns that it could be facing a legal battle with Nintendo over Pals' similarity to Pokemon. According to Mizobe, the game has passed legal reviews, and no company has taken any action against it. "We make our games very seriously," Mizobe says, "and we have absolutely no intention of infringing upon the intellectual property of other companies."

While the Pokemon influences are apparent, Mizobe points out elsewhere in the interview that Palworld, with its open-world survival and crafting mechanics, has a lot more in common with Studio Wildcard's dino offering Ark: Survival Evolved than it does with the Nintendo series.

Palworld may look cute on the surface, but there's another distinctly darker side to the game, as players recently learned when they discovered you could capture humans and sell their "very valuable" parts on the in-game black market. Yes, really.

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