Steam’s latest hit survival game, Palworld, has been accused of plagiarizing design from Pokémon, as social media users negatively highlight the historical connection between the game’s creator and the generating AI tools.
Palworld, by Japanese studio Pocketpair, was released in early access on PC and Xbox on Friday and was an instant success, with its creator claiming to have sold 2 million copies in 24 hours.
The big reveal at launch inevitably reignited the debate that has followed Palworld since its announcement over the apparent similarities in character design to Pokemon.
Palworld’s gameplay is closer to survival games like Ark and Rust than Game Freak’s series, but many social media users have noted that its character designs are clearly influenced by Nintendo’s series. doing.
Following Friday’s release of Palworld, some X users have collated perceived similarities between Palworld’s “Pals” and Pokémon.
“Not subtle about rip-offs, but how much else has been stolen?” one user wrote. Another user said, “I’d love to like Palworld, but I’m not sure if it can support running existing Pokémon through Fuser and passing them off as ‘new’ IPs.” I added.
In the eyes of some, the situation is further muddied by Pocket Pair’s historical relationship with generative AI tools.Artist Zaytli I got it. In X, one of the previous titles was “AI: Art Swindler”a game that literally uses an AI image generator as its core mechanic.
The user also highlighted several historical X posts by Pocketpair CEO Takuro Mizobe, in which he appeared to extol the potential of AI image generators in content creation.
The use of generative AI is under great pressure in many creative industries, including video games, and tools like Midjourney are designed to replace professional artists and prevent unauthorized use of their work in training sets. It has been criticized by some who think it is.
Early this month, Ongoing litigation For Midjourney, Stability AI, and DeviantArt List thousands of artist names Plaintiffs allege that their artwork was removed for training purposes.
One of Pocketpair CEO’s 2022 X posts discussed how he believes generative AI tools could one day be sophisticated enough to avoid copyright issues. In another potentially more damning post from 2021, Mizobe showed how to use his AI to generate new Pokémon designs.
Of course, this does not prove that Palworld’s design was created using AI.But if this is indeed the case, Pocketpair in particular Mostly inexperienced teamSome of them were amateurs and some worked at convenience stores.
in blog post In a paper published this week, CEO Mizobe even claimed that the concept for Palworld’s 100 characters was mostly created by a single graduate student.
“As a new graduate, she applied to nearly 100 companies and was rejected by all of them,” he wrote. “And she currently draws most of the characters in Palworld.”
Elsewhere in the post, Mizobe explains how Pocketpair’s previous game, Craftopia, was built primarily using off-the-shelf assets, and how the company We talk about how there was no animation staff.
“It’s truly a miracle that “Pal World” was born, completed, and turned into such a fun game,” he wrote.
VGC has reached out to Pocketpair for comment on this matter.
Palworld is described by its creators as an “action-adventure survival game” where players can fight and capture Pals to build bases, traverse, and use them in combat.
Accusations of plagiarism regarding some character designs don’t seem to bother players as much as they did at the time of publication Palworld reviews are very positive With steam.
In Europe, the EU is Movement to regulate generative AI, Therefore, companies must disclose the copyrighted data used for training. And just last week, Valve has changed its rules for games with AI-generated assets on SteamTherefore, developers must clearly disclose their usage.