Takura Mizone, the CEO of Pocketpair has said that he is proud that other studios are making clones of Palworld.
After finding out other studios are making mobile clones for Palworld, the CEO expressed his surprise upon receiving the news.
テンセントが早速パルワールドのクローンゲーム作ってる!
中国では各社が一斉にパルワールドのモバイル向けクローンを開発していて、しかも予算規模はパルワールドの10倍の100億円級・・・来年は原神クオリティのモンスター(または美少女)育成ゲームが大量にリリースされそう・・・
すごい時代 pic.twitter.com/RKqLz2RGOH
— Takuro Mizobe | Palworld (@urokuta_ja) April 16, 2024
Tencent is already making a Palworld clone game! In China, various companies are simultaneously developing mobile clones of Palworld, and the budget scale is about 10 billion yen, 10 times that of Palworld… It looks like there will be a ton of Genshin-quality monster (or girl) breeding games released next year… Amazing times (Translated By Google)
Soon after the post, many viewers seemed to have taken the post out of context, feeling that the CEO was unhappy with other studios attempting to imitate their game. This sparked a small debate, with some feeling that the CEO was being a hypocrite, as Palworld has had its fair share of controversy, with the most prominent being it was heavily accused of plagiarizing Pokemon.
On April 18th, 2024, Mizone made another post to clarify his previous post, stating that he does not think Tencent is doing anything wrong and that his original post was not made with the intent to accuse them.
This is my original post. I didn’t accuse.https://t.co/p50CuNjLH9
— Takuro Mizobe | Palworld (@urokuta_ja) April 17, 2024
Furthermore, he also said that he felt proud that other companies want to make games like Palworld, and that the game industry has historically innovated when they borrow ideas from other games.
At one point, The Pokemon Company released a statement stating that they were investigating a game for IP infringements. While The Pokemon Company did not explicitly mention Palworld by name in the official statement, many people believed that they are referring to Palworld in response to the plagiarism accusations.
Even still, Palworld was still an immensely successful game, with concurrent player peak numbers overtaking many popular games over its lifetime, with it overtaking Counter-Strike 2 in peak numbers at one point.