Palworld CEO Responds to Plagiarism Accusations

Following plagiarism allegations that Palworld copied its monster designs from Pokémon, developer Pocketpair’s CEO has issued a response. Has it cleared things up? Well, not exactly.

Palworld, the recently released game that features Pokémon with guns game, has proven ridiculously popular. Its Early Access/Game Preview incarnation has, according to SteamDB’s figures, become the most popular non-free-to-play game on Steam, beating even Cyberpunk 2077‘s record with over 1.5 million concurrent players.

But it’s been suggested that the game’s Pokémon analogs, Pals, are not just inspired by Pokémon but are actually copied from various Pokémon games, potentially with the involvement of AI. It doesn’t help that one of Pocketpair’s previous games, AI: Art Inspector, has players issuing commands to create AI art.

As reported by VGC, Pocketpair CEO Takuro Mizobe tweeted out a response to the plagiarism allegations, saying that Palworld artists have been receiving death threats. The tweet is in Japanese, but according to the reasonably reliable Google Translate, it reads:

“I have received a variety of opinions regarding Palworld, but all productions related to Palworld are supervised by multiple people, including myself, and I am responsible for the production. I would appreciate it if you would refrain from slandering the artists involved in Palworld.”

Mizobe isn’t specifically addressing the alleged plagiarism and AI use, but he’s taking a the-buck-stops-here approach to Palworld‘s production.

However, as VGC also notes, one Twitter user has been comparing the models in Palworld to those in Pokémon Violet and Scarlet. And according to that user, their models and proportions are very similar to the creatures in Game Freak’s games.

Maybe they're brothers? #Palworld #Pokemon #Lycanroc model from SV. pic.twitter.com/KnGSozfJGQ

— byo (@byofrog) January 21, 2024

The alleged involvement of AI muddies things further. Mizobe has, it seems, previously tweeted about the possibility of using AI to generate “new” Pokémon. There’s still no confirmed evidence that Palworld has used AI, but it seems unlikely this situation is going to go away any time soon.