Gamers flock to Palworld’s ‘Pokémon with guns’ despite copyright qualms

techcrunch.com:

When Palworld made its inauspicious debut in a teaser a year or so back, few thought this strange, blatant Pokémon ripoff would be anything but a quickly forgotten oddity. But after its Early Access release last week, the game has broken records and sold millions — reflecting the pent-up demand for a truly modern Pokémon-type game that the franchise’s developers seem unwilling to provide.

Whatever sales Palworld’s developers, a Japanese outfit called Pocketpair best known for a game called Craftworld, were expecting have surely been exceeded by an order of magnitude. The game has sold at least 5 million copies in its first week, and hit 1.5 million concurrent players on Steam over the weekend — a feat matched only by a handful of AAA games over the years.

What the hell is going on? The simple fact is that Palworld is what Pokémon fans have been asking for for years, or at least close enough to count. And whether they’re buying because they truly want it, or they want to punish Nintendo and Game Freak, or because they’re curious, or because the under-$30 price tag was too easy to justify… they’re buying it.

It’s broken through to the mainstream so much that my non-gaming friends are talking about it, and one texted me while I was typing this paragraph asking if they should snag it. Truly it is the flavor of the… week? Month? It’s hard to say. But this sort of out-of-the-blue hit has become one of the primary aspirational goals of smaller developers, for whom even half a million sales would be a huge success.

The concept of the game is easily grasped: you’re exploring a mysterious island populated by Pals, which are plainly dollar-store Pokémon. As you build your base, you capture and deploy Pals to act as your escorts and your workforce. Leave a few Lamballs and Cattivas chopping wood, mining, and tending the berry plantation while you and your Eikthyrdeer roam the island, mowing down low-level Pals and human poachers. All the while you steadily climb a tech tree, going