Have you ever done something where, you knew before you started, you were going to face an uphill struggle, fierce competition/opposition, threats of serious repercussions and uncertainty as to how your actions or what you make will be received ? In this article I’d like to build on my previous article around the first principles of creative media and talk about Palworld’s. The focus of this article is knowing your why and holding on to it under pressure in creative media design.
The Game That Wasn’t Supposed to Exist
Palworld is an upcoming monster-taming, 3rd person, open-world, survival, video game for console and PC. created and published by Japanese developer Pocketpair. The game was announced in 2021 and entered early access on Steam in January 2024, later arriving on console the same year. And as of writing this the version 1.0, full release is set for tomorrow! (10/07/2026) which I was unaware of but am now super excited about!
from personal experience, the concept and original marketing for the game was extremely eye catching and interesting, the game play even in early access was smooth and incredibly fun, while a little light on lore/ story as most open-world survivals tend to be, the game itself features many mechanisms for both increased replay ability and expansion, as the bedrock for the gameplay itself is well thought out and has plenty of room not necessarily for improvement, but definitely for growth, but mainly and in a less analytical framing, the game is FUN, which I hope you’ll agree and see is the most important thing for a game to be.
Greatness in the making
Now I know what you are thinking, years for full release, which if you know the statistics on how many games get early-access but never make it to full release, isn’t too surprising, however if you have also followed the backstory/ drama of the publishing of Palworld, you’re probably thinking it’s a miraculous day most thought would never come, including the Devs themselves I imagine. This all centres around their main IP, the focus of the game and the genre it finds itself in, “Pokémon, with guns!” which I’ll be first to admit is exactly what interested me in the game when I first found its steam page, and what drove me to pay the modest price to download and find out.
I’ll put on hold a diatribe about my love of systems and automation that this reminds me of for now, after all if a creature can fire a weapon it can most likely use other tools and if I can command them it will most likely be capable of fulfilling other tasks on my behalf, and I would like to focus on the main cause of controversy, what is most important about the release of the game and less so the how but more so the WHY of the dev’s building this wonderful piece of creative digital media.
How One Game Franchise Froze an Entire Genre
So, creature taming, and more specifically Monster taming. Since its advent in the 1990’s this genre of games has mostly been overlooked, but back in the 1990’s the new introduction of this category of games caused somewhat of a small explosion in the cultural and gaming landscape. Personally I loved the concept, and being only a kid at the time i wasn’t particularly aware of the economic and societal forces at play, however I was shocked how quickly the obsession spread, how amazing the concept was and how beautiful it was that culture had an overwhelming effect on things like social barriers and dynamics, at the time it no longer mattered what your skin colour or gender was or whether you were posh or not, what really mattered was if you had a red or blue copy of the Pokémon Gameboy game or if you had any trading card duplicates to trade.
There were several competing IP in the space at the time, including things like Digimon (which still has a running anime) and Medabots (which was awesome on Gameboy but I haven’t heard from since, RIP) even the slightly older and more niche title of jade cocoon, which I could rant about forever and had a way more advanced game mechanic than it had any right to have and that hasn’t been seen since, which involved merging creatures together which changed both their stats AND physical 3D appearance, however the main one was most definitely Pokémon.
The Cultural Takeover That Froze a Genre
When it first arrived to the UK, Pokémon came in force; a TV show, a Gameboy game and later a trading card game, with other merchandise to follow and a lasting legacy baked in. there was a point in time you couldn’t talk to another kid without them mentioning something to do with Pokémon, trading cards or the Gameboy game, it was that powerful and explosive in the minds of children everywhere. And while there had previously been several crazes, I can distinctly remember when I was a kid; from Tamagotchi’s, and football sticker books, to crazy bones and Bionicle’s. I doubt anything will ever come close to how powerful, effective and might I add, well-orchestrated, the Pokémon craze was.
I’m unsure of the timing but I can guarantee there as a week where the cultural package was neatly delivered, the weekend that followed in which what must have been nearly every child in the country watched the first episode of the animated Pokémon series, the stage was set and the Monday following the bomb exploded. Every shop had the trading cards, the video games, the cute stuffed Pokémon dolls etc, and what must have been the poke master’s, so to speak, plan was executed to perfection. Our culture and the minds of kids everywhere was entirely saturated by Poké fever leaving an indelible mark on a generation and a huge entry into the history and technical practice of how a company should release a product. And there in lies both the problem, and the beginnings of the makers own downfall, Pokémon, as an IP was WAY too successful, even for its own good.
When Protecting IP Becomes Killing Creativity
See after the dust settled, and most kids had moved on to other stuff and collecting all 151(inclusive of mew and Mewtwo) of the original Pokémon had been mostly forgotten and left to the geeks like me that still had the Gameboy game, an obsession with game mechanics or full completion and no one to trade with, Pokémon had been crowned the winner and pretty much the owner of the creature collecting genre of video games, and once the publishers had realised that fact they did pretty much everything they could to entrench, solidify and retain that monopoly for what they saw as until the end of time.
Seemingly holding on to the monopoly took such a precedent , on inspection of their more recent offerings, that things like actual game development, improving on the IP and even regeneration or replication of the original, what I would now term as a cultural take over, for a later audience, has seemingly gone entirely by the wayside, and unfortunately, so too has the entire genre of creature collecting.
Back to today
In the modern gaming era, the Pokémon monopoly and its zombie-like decay has left the creature-taming genre largely abandoned. What was once a culturally explosive concept has been reduced to freemium mobile money-sinks and forgotten Gameboy classics. The controllers of the Pokémon IP have spent the past two decades less focused on innovation and more focused on legally shutting down anyone who dares expand the genre — sending a chilling effect throughout the industry.
Their recent titles have been received poorly, even graphical polish has slipped if you’ve seen any of the texture mapping screengrabs, and meaningful gameplay evolution has stalled. The people behind that iron curtain aren’t protecting fun. They’re protecting abstracted financial interests. Which leads me to ask: do you create things for people to enjoy, or do you create things to stop other people from creating things?
Knowing Your Why
And after that rant and at the risk of being sued and reigniting the bonfire, in walks Palworld, “the Pokémon with guns”, A game in which the developers knew from the start they would face a hard time in releasing and stuck to their guns (pardon the pun) anyway. But more importantly and tying this back to the first article and the main point of this one, the dev’s of Palworld thought of an interesting idea for a game that would be fun and knew they wanted to make a game players would enjoy and stuck to it regardless of the potential consequences, which honestly I can’t praise highly enough.
Like I stated before there have been many monster-taming games, some much older like jade cocoon (please for the love of god bring it back) but few in the recent past, mainly due to the potential for a kibosh by the likes of Pokémon’s IP controllers. The few examples I can think of that escaped the suits and court orders are either used to skim money from bored people via a mobile app, or who just failed to garner a decent audience (im thinking of you TemTem). So how and why did Palworld so far succeed in not only taking on the lawsuit but create a game that could genuinely be called groundbreaking and build a cult following?
My Reasoning
In my view it comes down to 2 or 3 things;
1 sheer force of will, they wanted to make something fun so badly they didn’t care what would happen after.
2 innovations, cross-pollinating 2 highly disparate concepts, i.e. Open-world survival and creature-taming, gave rise to something amazing and also allowed for such a high level of freedom to expand on the concept that it’s nearly unbelievable.
and 3 I’m probably supposed to say luck, but really I feel I know my fellow gamer well enough to say it was the audience, people took one look at the concept, character design and early access release steam page and thought “that looks cool as all hell, why not !” like I did AND quite crucially, they weren’t disappointed with what they downloaded, even for those like myself that aren’t quite fans of open world survival franchises as a whole.
There are many deeper levels to this regardless of Palworld hopefully future success and though I will save the deepest one for my conclusion, there are some important factors to note on the way down.
Openly Derivative, Entirely Original
See Palworld was openly derivative of Pokémon, they made no bones about it from the start, infact the first I heard of the game was being told “there’s a Pokémon with guns game coming out” to which my first response (if I recall correctly) was “yeah, like that’s ever going to see the light of day”, and here we are so close to it being taken out of early access, and I personally am so thankful to the developers clarity of vision and honesty for it and no doubt this has garnered them a serious fanbase myself included.
Pocketpair knew what they were doing would cause a storm, but kept on the dev grind, sinking hundreds or even thousands of hours into development, a fact that seemingly hasn’t stopped since release by the way, and were even honest about it from the start, and that includes being honest about what their original intention behind making the game was, staying true to their first principles and the basis for all creative media.
The Storm
While getting sued by Nintendo of all companies should most definitely be seen as just a badge of honour at this point, it is a badge few companies have had the privilege of surviving being awarded — and survive it they have. Nintendo’s lawsuit has effectively crumbled, narrowed to older game versions Pocketpair already patched out, with a maximum possible payout of around $30,000 on a case that cost Nintendo an estimated $40 million in legal fees. Pocketpair didn’t just survive — they watched their Goliath defeat itself [source].
And maybe I’m wrong about all this, what if Palworld was just something they had cooking on a back burner and were only playing about with it on the dev floor without much intention for release, but they had the sense to realise they had created something incredibly fun and enjoyable and released it, which I doubt the premise seeing as how polished it was even in early access.
either way at some point they will have realised either intentionally or not they were probably in for a hard time, but they knew what they were working on was truly enjoyable, and that the gaming community would take note and stuck with it regardless. That’s not just a business decision, that is a creative one. Focusing on your creation and exactly what feeling you are trying to inspire with your work is a monumentally important element in any creators process.
First Principles in Action
There exists a difference between any piece of media that is made with the focus on sharing a feeling with its audience, and one centred around some sort of concept, gimmick, or objective reason. I hope to explore that difference further in later articles but for now it is sufficient to say that the concept of Palworld as a game is derivative, without Pokémon we wouldn’t have Palworld, but the creators of Palworld understood the difference between the theory behind how a game is created from concept to reality, but more importantly the WHY a game is created, truly understanding the feeling they wanted to share with the world and sticking to that mission regardless of the risks.
The chaotic, irreverent, beautiful and incredibly fun world they created is entirely their own, and however they choose to further develop it, their work will always stand as a prime example of first principles in action in the creative media space.
