As is to be expected following its successful launch, more games in the style of Palworld are in development. Upon its release in January on Steam Early Access and Xbox Game Preview, there was plenty of controversy surrounding how similar some of Palworld‘s “Pals” were to Pokémon, resulting in The Pokémon Company launching a copy investigation, although Palworld‘s developer, Pocket Pair, insisted that its game is much closer to survival sandbox titles such as Ark: Survival Evolved and Valheim and passed several legal checks before its release.
While many would have assumed that small indie companies – not too dissimilar to Pocket Pair, which itself only has under 50 employees according to the company’s LinkedIn page – would have been the first to try to copy Palworld‘s success with a string of survival-based titles featuring collectible cartoon monsters, it looks like one of the biggest games companies in the world, Tencent Holdings Ltd. is trying to get in on the action first. According to Bloomberg, two of Tencent’s most accomplished creative studios, Timi and Lightspeed are both building mobile games in the style of Palworld to power Tencent’s next wave of growth.
According to Bloomberg, Tencent reported a 2% decline in games revenue in the 2023 holiday quarter, as its rival NetEase Inc.’s Eggy Party has cornered the market for a new genre of party games. Since then, Tencent has been strategically shifting many of its resources, incubating multiple, competing projects to breed the best results. This recently led to reports that the China-based mobile title, Assassin’s Creed Jade, which Tencent was developing alongside Ubisoft, was delayed into 2025 to focus on Tencent’s Eggy Party competitor, DreamStar.
With DreamStar also recently dropping to a new historical low in terms of domestic iOS sales, it’s clear that Tencent has seen the success Pocket Pair has seen with Palworld, which was made with a small team with limited resources but saw a peak of over 2 million simultaneous players, and sees it as a way to get out of its slump. Timi and Lightspeed have achieved great results for Tencent in the past, with bestselling titles such as Honor of Kings, Call of Duty Mobile, and Peacekeeper Elite, so unless the hype for Palworld-type games dies off by the time their new mobile titles are released, it seems like a sure win for Tencent.
There has been no official announcement from Tencent, Timi, or Lightspeed regarding their Palworld-esque titles, but Bloomberg reports that several job listings seem to back up these claims. According to these reports, the job listings seek developers with Unreal Engine experience to work on a “fantasy adventure world with cute pets” with the title combining open-world, survival, and crafting elements with the nurturing of virtual pets, which definitely sounds like Palworld.
Sources: Bloomberg, Pocket Pair/LinkedIn