The Pokémon Company Launches Investigation Into ‘Palworld’ Designs After Receiving “Many Inquires” Alleging IP Infringement
Spencer Baculi
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After receiving a flood of “inquiries” – ostensibly sent by the Nintendo-owned franchise’s fans out of nothing more than a self-assumed duty to blindly defend the stagnating game series’ refusal to innovate – alleging IP infringement by the newly released title, The Pokémon Company has announced that they will officially be undertaking a copyright investigation into Pocket Pair Inc.’s Palworld monster designs.
First announced in June 2021, Palworld is a monster-catching, open-world survival game – think Pokémon-meets-ARK: Survival Evolved – wherein players are tasked with collecting various ‘Pals’ to help them in exploring and surviving the local Palapagos Islands.
To this end, after capturing a given Pal in a ‘Pal Sphere, players can then assign their new companions to perform various tasks around their local camp, including but not limited to farming, fighting, and forced labor, the latter usually done in service of manufacturing more items or developing the production and defense capabilities of one’s home base.
But while most such monster-catching titles force players to rely solely on their monsters to engage with their respective combat elements, Palworld instead invites them to get in on the action themselves and fight alongside their companions using a variety of weapons ranging from fists, to swords, to full-on firearms.
Thanks to both its offering of what can best be described as a more expansive take on Pokémon Legends: Arceus – which notably drew high praise for actually pushing the franchise in the open-world direction many had long hoped it would eventually take – and players widely having found themselves frustrated with the lack of effort put by Pokémon into their recent Sword/Shield and Scarlet/Violet entries that Palworld‘s January 18th, 2024 early access release was met with a tidal wave of success, selling over 1 Million copies in its first eight hours on sale.
And in the week since it’s release, these metaphorical tides have only continued to rise for Palworld. As of writing, not only has the game sold over 8 Million total copies, but it has also set the record for the second-highest consecutive player count of any paid Steam game, having posted a total of 2,018,905 tamers on January 24th.
(For those curious, the top spot in this category currently belongs to PUBG: Battlegrounds, which posted 3,257,248 players in January 2018.)
However, not all was dollar signs and dancing for Palworld, as though a very evident magnitude of players found themselves enjoying the game, there were a number – particularly the aforementioned Pokémon diehards – who responded to its success by attempting to poke any hole they could into its reputation.
While this campaign saw a number of tactics deployed by critics, including accusing its art assets of being generated with AI due simply to Pocket Pair Inc.’s CEO’s own self-professed interest in the technology and vaguely claiming, as Naughty Dog Senior Artist Del Walker did, that it was “made nefariously” and by “cheating”, perhaps none was more prominent than that which saw their monster designs charged with being nothing more than wholesale rip-offs of various Pokémon.
And while, admittedly, a number of Palworld’s Pals do share some admitted visual similarities to their Game Freak-developed predecessors, arguments to this end were often made based on Olympic-level reaches and bad-faith interpretations of common character design elements.
Unfortunately for Palworld, despite the equal amounts of visual evidence to support the Pals’ designs being, at least for the most part, original, it seems its critics have managed to escalate their complaints to The Pokémon Company themselves, as on January 25th, the company announced that in light of a number of “inquiries regarding other companies’ games”, it would be launching an official investigation into the entire situation.
“We have received many inquiries regarding another company’s game released in January 2024,” wrote The Pokémon Company in a statement published to their official website. “We have not granted any permission for the use of Pokémon intellectual property or assets in that game. We intend to investigate and take appropriate measures to address any acts that infringe on intellectual property rights related to the Pokémon. We will continue to cherish and nurture each and every Pokémon and its world, and work to bring the world together through Pokémon in the future.”
As of writing, Pocket Pair Inc. has yet to offer an official comment on The Pokémon Company’s announcement.
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