Pocketpair’s CEO explained just how little experience the team had before making the smash hit.
You could make a convincing argument that Steam sensation Palworld shouldn’t exist, but you don’t have to—the game’s creator has already made that argument himself. Not because it’s controversial, though it is that—the bizarre mash-up of sandbox survival and perverse reimagining of catching ‘em all has been accused of copying Pokémon models and using AI art. Even PETA provided a statement to Insider Gaming regarding players’ ability to devour their Pals after using them for hard labor (unsurprisingly, the group doesn’t seem thrilled by the idea.)
But before all that, a few days prior to launch, the head of Palworld developer Pocketpair wrote a lengthy blog post about everything that went wrong during its extremely unmethodical development. From the lack of a concrete budget to a completely inexperienced team, the game’s completion and successful launch are mind-boggling.
I translated the most surprising anecdotes from Pocketpair CEO / Palworld producer Takuro Mizobe, who called Palworld’s creation “the antithesis of proper game development.”Palworld had no budget and the producer still doesn’t know exactly how much it cost to make
“No sane company would start developing a game without a budget,” Takuro Mizobe said. “But Pocketpair is not a sane company.”
Before the small Tokyo-based developer began work on Palworld in earnest, it first spent three months developing a trailer. “If the response to the trailer was poor, it wouldn’t be worth making the game in the first place. That’s why we didn’t even bother making a budget to start.
Initially, I intended to make Palworld in one year. I didn’t have any intention to make a major title, and I had no desire to spend years working on the same thing. But with only 10 of us on the team to start, I began to realize how impossible that would be.
“So I started asking myself—what’s the budget? When the balance in our bank account reached zero, we could always just borrow money or release money just before the company went bankrupt.
