As the multiplayer monster collecting game Palworld continues to record impressive sales numbers and break its own concurrent player records, some less avid Pokemon fans are wondering just how similar Palworld is to Pokemon. Some people share what they’re doing on social media.
Palworld, the “gun-toting Pokémon” survival game that was released as an early access title yesterday, January 19th, and has already sold over 2 million copies, is now showing similarities between the game and Pokémon that are hard to believe. It faces claims that it’s too big.
“Please be careful not to support Palworld,” one disgruntled user wrote. X/Twitter. “We’re not subtle about rip-offs, but how much else has been stolen?”
“I’m going to start a thread now. […] Palworld design analysis, trying to identify all the jumbled Pokemon,” added another, with an amazing image showing how similar some of Palworld’s characters are to Pokemon characters shared a number of
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“The argument that ‘there are too many Pokemon to design a monster without accidentally copying at least one’ may be a valid point, but in this case it’s hard to believe what they’re doing. It’s as blatant as it gets,” added artist LuxxArt. “I’ve never seen any of the ‘friends’ and I don’t know exactly which Pokemon they took from.
“I don’t think they’re trying to fool anyone into thinking Pal is a Pokemon. I think it’s mostly to get attention out of anger. It’s also lazy. I don’t think they’re trying to fool anyone into thinking Pal is a Pokemon. Why come up with an original design for your game when you can?” ”
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Fans even spotted a tweet from Pocket Pair CEO Takuro Mizobe detailing how copyrighted images can be altered by “passing” them to an AI to “resolve” copyright disputes. In another video, Mizobe actually uses images of the original Pokemon to show how the AI can generate equivalent characters.
Neither developer Pocketpair nor the Pokémon Company have publicly commented on the alleged similarities.
Palworld ranks 10th on Steam’s Most Played Games chart, with 855,706 concurrent players on Steam alone (it was 11th just this morning). That’s ahead of biggies like Apex Legends, viral hits Among Us, and Valheim.
Earlier today, the team said on social media that they had to hold an “emergency meeting” with Epic Games to “add updates to Epic Games’ backend” as Palworld’s concurrent player count exceeded 700,000. explained.
To see it in action, check out Zoe’s excellent early access review. This review is embedded above.