Palworld director responds to Pokemon plagiarism allegations
PocketpairPalworld’s director has now responded to plagiarism allegations that refer to the game as a Pokemon rip-off. Here’s what they said.
With almost 500,000 concurrent players over the weekend, Palworld surpassed all other games in terms of sales, solidifying its status as the most popular game right now. Gamers have compared the newest survival RPG to a “Pokemon with guns” because of how popular it is.
PC, Xbox Game Pass, and Series X/S users may get their hands on the game now, while Nintendo and PlayStation owners are out in the cold. Whatever the case may be, the game has garnered sufficient attention due to the allegations that it could be a Pokemon knockoff.
Pocketpair/The Pokemon CompanyIn response to numerous claims by Pokemon fans that the game plagiarises existing content and that they discovered tweets from Pocket Pair’s CEO suggesting that the creatures are AI-generated, the director of Palworld has now made a public statement in an interview with VGC.
Below is their entire statement regarding the matter in their response to the publication.
Palworld director responds to allegations of plagiarism of 3D models
Palworld CEO and game director Takuro Mizobe responded to allegations on X that claim Palworld copied 3D models of Pokemon and has plagiarized the majority of their content. In the response, Mizobe stated that the dev team has been receiving death threats and abuses on social media.
Mizobe further continued, “While we have received various opinions about Palworld, it is important to note that the supervision of all materials related to Palworld is conducted by a team, including myself. I bear the responsibility for the produced materials.” He then concluded by requesting users to refrain from commenting hate speech and such slurs to the Pocket Pair team.
While this response was issued, news publication VGC reached out to senior AAA game devs on their comment on the entire drama. One such developer told them, “You cannot, in any way, accidentally get the same proportions on multiple models from another game without ripping the models. I would stand in court to testify as an expert on this.”
Another dev commented, “When does ‘heavily inspired’ become a blatant copy? It’s much easier to take a successful style and tweak it slightly than it is to come up with a new, cohesive style, right? I wouldn’t be comfortable passing this off as my work; it’s just too close in many places.”
They continued, “If those are original Pokemon models shown in those videos, then Nintendo should be home and dry in terms of demonstrating copying. That could be a smoking gun.”
VGC has also reached out to the Pocket Pair dev team for a statement on the matter as more such allegations continue to surface on social media that blatantly point out the similarities of the new game to the much larger Pokemon Brand.