Takuro Mizobe, the creator of monster-taming indie game Palworld explains how he and his team were able to take the world by storm with their Pokémon-esque action-adventure title.
In a interview with Bloomberg last month, Mizobe says that a few out-of-the-box ideas designed to promote online chatter – such as the bodies of defeated enemies remaining lifeless in the game – helped push the game to surprise stardom.
In Palworld, the bodies of defeated Pals remain in the game, meaninglessly. Typically, when you kill monsters or enemies, they either disappear or linger to be looted. Colleagues were against leaving useless bodies in the game, but I pushed it through because I thought players would find a way to play with and talk about it.
Takuro Mizobe goes on to say that Palworld’s success has raked in tens of billions of Japanese yen in profit, an amount he says is too large for a studio of their size, according to the report.
Bloombergからインタビュー受けました。写真が凄い。https://t.co/twt4YqlbiR
— Takuro Mizobe | Palworld (@urokuta_ja) March 15, 2024
However, Mizobe, the chief executive of Pocketpair, the firm that created Palworld, says that the company does not play on spending lavishly and would instead prefer to remain a small-scale operation that doesn’t focus on big budget AAA titles.
We are and will remain a small studio. I want to make multiple small games. Big-budget triple-A games are not for us.
Palworld was released in January and was met with instant acclaim from fans. According to German stat-tracking website Statistica, as of February 22, Palworld has sold over 25 million copies between Xbox and PC.
