The developer behind the enormously popular Palworld said that it hasn’t actually faced any sort of legal action from Nintendo or the Pokemon Company.
In an interview with GameFile, Pocketpair CEO Takuro Mizobe explained, “[We heard] nothing at all. Nintendo and the Pokemon Company didn’t say anything to us.” Palworld has been nicknamed “Pokemon with guns” by the general gaming community and players have noted the similarities between Palworld’s creatures, called “Pals” and the ones in Pokemon.
Earlier this year, Nintendo issued a statement saying that it would investigate acts that infringe on Pokemon’s intellectual property rights.
Interestingly, Mizobe also said that creating something new is hard, and that he’d like to avoid it as much as possible. It was a lesson that he learned from working with Nintendo itself early in his game-development career. He was previously part of a training program sponsored by Nintendo for a year and helped launch a game called Tentai Shooter for the Nintendo DSi.
Palworld has been a massive success since it launched into early access on PC and Xbox earlier this year, passing 12 million copies sold on Steam and 19 million players total as of the end of January. Its first major content drop, the Sakurajima update, launches on June 27 with a brand-new island and a PvP arena mode.
