Palworld CEO says “many” clones of Pokémon-with-guns game are coming, with “Genshin Impact-level” successors
Working with budgets ‘ten times larger’ than Pocketpair, apparently
Palworld, the viral survival game that stirred up controversy (and found plenty of success) on the back of being a Pokémon-a-like - with added guns and factory labour, mind - is now due to become the inspiration for its own generation of clones, according to the head of its developers.
Pocketpair CEO and Palworld director Takuro Mizobe X-ed a screenshot of upcoming multiplayer sandbox-survival game Auroria, which appears to be, uh, Palworld in space. Or No Man’s Sky with Fall Guys-like bean-shaped alien companions you can go out and catch, if you’d prefer another X-meets-Y comparison.
Auroria is being developed for PC and mobile by Chinese studio Tianjin Wumai Technology, who are owned by megacorp co-publisher Tencent. Mizobe suggested that “many” more clones of Palworld were already in the works for release in 2025, including games able to reach a “Genshin Impact-level” of quality thanks to apparently working with budgets ten times bigger than Pocketpair.
“Tencent is already making a Palworld clone game!” Mizobe tweeted (via Automaton). “In China, many companies are simultaneously developing mobile clones of Palworld, and the budgets are in the 10 billion yen-range, 10 times larger than Palworld’s…
“Next year, we might see many Genshin Impact-level creature (or bishojo) raising games… These are incredible times.”
Auroria is due to land on Steam towards the end of 2024, offering a familiar-sounding mixture of building up a base with friends, exploring its open world, crafting using resources collected from the environment, and taming the pets and mounts you catch. It certainly sounds a lot like Palworld, but you could also apply most of this description to any survival game released in the last five years or so.
Meanwhile, Pocketpair are continuing to update and expand Palworld while working on something that could be described as “a Hollow Knight clone with added Dead Cells”. I look forward to Pocketpair claiming they invented the Metroidvania when that comes out.