Palworld studio Pocketpair won’t be publishing games with AI, Web3, or NFTs in them, because the company “doesn’t believe in it”.
After the success of Palworld, Pocketpair launched a publishing arm earlier this year. Communications director and publishing manager John Buckley spoke to Game Developer at Gamescom Asia about the use of controversial technology.
“People are going to say I’m lying, but these are just the hard facts,” he said. “We don’t believe in it. We’re very upfront about it. If you’re big on AI stuff or your game is Web3 or uses NFTs, there are lots of publishers out there [who’ll talk to you], but we’re not the right partner for that.”
Pocketpair has been falsely accused of using AI in its games, particularly due to the perceived similarity between its Pal monsters and the pocket monsters of Pokémon.
Buckley admitted it’s hard to quash such rumours, despite the company’s stance against the technology.
Recently, Pocketpair was accused on social media of using machine translation tools to localise Palworld for a handful of countries. Buckley said this was incorrect and based on an incomplete list of credits, but sometimes it’s best to ignore social media noise.
“You know, I can’t just come out and start fighting with these people [who make the AI accusations] because that just fuels what’s going on,” said Buckley.
“[Regarding the translation accusation], one of their biggest pieces of ‘evidence’ was that because we hadn’t published the individual names of the translators it must be AI. Well, no, this is just poor Japanese culture in general. A lot of Japanese games, the credits will say localisation was handled by a company.
“I’m not saying [that it is] right. It’s unfortunate. We don’t like it as much as anybody else. But it’s how a lot of these companies want to operate.”
Following the accusations, Pocketpair acquired individual names from the localisation company used and updated the credits accordingly.
“A lot of the people in that thread said ‘we appreciate you taking the time’ but of course there are still some people in that thread who say ‘it’s not enough, it’s AI’,” said Buckley. “That’s when I feel there’s nothing more we can do here. I can say ‘it’s not, we made it’ and they can say ‘it is, you didn’t make it’ and what are we going to do? Just go back and forth forever.”
AI is an ongoing hot topic in the industry – according to a report from Japan’s Computer Entertainment Supplier’s Association, organiser of the Tokyo Games Show, over half of Japanese game companies are using AI in development.
Pocketpair published Dead Take from Tales of Kenzer developer Surgent Studios, which was released in the summer.
Now it’s looking to fix “jank” in Palworld as it pushes towards a full 1.0 release in 2026, in the wake of an ongoing lawsuit with Nintendo.
