Palworld: Is It Fair to Call It a Pokémon Rip-Off?

ign.com:

Palworld – the brand new, sort-of-Pokémon, open-world, third-person, shooting, action adventure, crafting, survival, animal collecting, and other popular buzzwords – game launched on Steam and Xbox on January 19. It immediately blew up, selling six million copies in four days and instantly becoming a force to be reckoned with while simultaneously opening the floodgates of discourse surrounding intellectual property theft in video games. Since being revealed two years ago, Palworld – created by a developer named Pocketpair – has been commonly referred to as “Pokémon with guns” by anyone who has looked at it for more than three seconds. But as people dig deeper, they are discovering that Palworld is both a game that does enough to distance itself from Pokémon mechanically while also being a little too close for comfort to Pokémon artistically. So let’s dig into this controversy and figure out exactly what’s happening with Palworld.

Palworld is a hit for completely obvious reasons: it kitbashes a bunch of tremendously successful genres and previously proven gameplay mechanics under a warm and inviting art style for all ages. It’s got the third-person gunplay from Fortnite, the crafting and survival of Ark, and a ton of extremely Pokémon-looking — but not quite exactly Pokémon — animals from Game Freak’s beloved series. It also satisfies the lifelong dream of anyone who wanted to see Pokémon fire machine guns. It’s the game equivalent of a cooking video where a mom puts McDonalds french fries, Kraft Mac and Cheese, and Ore-Ida Tater Tots into a bunch of Old El Paso soft tortilla shells before serving it to her kids. It’s crowd pleasing junk food, but it’s also comfort food and it doesn’t really matter how innovative or original it all is if the end result sort of tastes good.

There are several less obvious reasons why Palworld is such a huge success. For one, on PC, where Palworld is seeing the overwhelming bulk of its sales, you can’t legally purchase and play a