I'm whacking at a rock as the sun sets. The game is telling me that I am cold and hungry. But I need to collect enough resources to make a Pal Sphere to catch some Pals so I can assign them to work at my base and gather even more resources.
I am in the very opening minutes of Palworld, a game made by an obscure Japanese indie studio named Pocketpair. Some combination of algorithmic providence and word of mouth helped the game score some impressive achievements in its first Early Access weekend: over 5 million copies sold and nearly 1.3 million concurrent Steam users playing the game, beating out the high-watermarks for big-name games like Cyberpunk 2077, Elden Ring, and Baldur's Gate 3.
The game's success means it has already been through multiple cycles of minor Internet controversy, mainly related to circumstantial evidence that its monster designs may have been created by generative AI or from the actual 3D models used in the Pokémon games.
I'm not here to rule one way or the other on this, except to say that I find the accusations of model theft more convincing than the generative AI accusations; making fake monsters in the style of Pokémon has been a pastime for many budding DeviantArt and Tumblr artists for years, long before generative AI could ever have had anything to do with it. Pocketpair CEO Takuro Mizobe has reportedly claimed that the game "has cleared legal reviews."
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The secret to Palworld's rise may be no more complicated than the three-word summary you'll see over and over in coverage of it: "Pokémon with guns." Countless parodies have found humor (and cash) in adding darkness to the bright, sanitized world of kids' toys and entertainment, from Garbage Pail Kids to the infamously vitriolic and universal campaign against Barney the dinosaur. Entire YouTube channels have been built around doing this to Pokémon and other games.