Publisher Krafton and Japanese developer Pocketpair have announced a new licensing agreement that will bring one of the breakout games of this year, Palworld, to mobile. Krafton said “it plans to faithfully reinterpret and implement the original’s main fun elements to fit the mobile environment. The project will be handled by the development team of ‘PUBG STUDIOS,’ a creative studio under Krafton.”
For those unfamiliar, Palworld is a monster-breeding open-world survival craft game that released earlier in the year on January 19. Players can collect over 100 unique creatures called “Pals” and use them for combat, construction, farming, or factory work.
Since its release in Early Access, the game has been a huge success, selling 15 million copies on Steam in one month, reaching 10 million users on Xbox and recording the 3rd highest number of Steam concurrent users of all-time with approximately 2.1 million players.
Palworld is currently available on PC, Xbox, and recently became available on PlayStation 5.
This news has been announced following Nintendo’s lawsuit against Pocketpair for patent infringement.
In a press release, Pocketpair said “At this moment, we are unaware of the specific patents we are accused of infringing upon, and we have not been notified of such details.”
“Pocketpair is a small indie game company based in Tokyo. Our goal as a company has always been to create fun games. We will continue to pursue this goal because we know that our games bring joy to millions of gamers around the world. Palworld was a surprise success this year, both for gamers and for us. We were blown away by the amazing response to the game and have been working hard to make it even better for our fans. We will continue improving Palworld and strive to create a game that our fans can be proud of.
It is truly unfortunate that we will be forced to allocate significant time to matters unrelated to game development due to this lawsuit. However, we will do our utmost for our fans, and to ensure that indie game developers are not hindered or discouraged from pursuing their creative ideas.”