Pokémon Company statement on Palworld copyright allegations sounds a lot like "please leave us the hell alone"
The august representatives of the Pokémon Company have descended from their hilltop PokéMansion, approached the hushed masses of PokéFans with their flaming Torchics and shocked Pichaku placards, and asked everybody to please, please, please, please, please stop yelling at them about Palworld potentially breaching Pokémon's copyright. Or at least, that's what it sounds like they're saying between the lines of a statement published a few hours ago, in which the Pokémon Company acknowledges messages sent by the concerned PokéFaithful about "another company's game released in January 2024".
If you're late to the party, possibly because you only play games on an Apple Macintosh 128K, Palworld is a new survival sim in the Ark vein with a monster-catching element. The monsters themselves, aka Pals, appear heavily inspired by Pokémon - the overall vibe is very much "Aldi variation on your favourite brand of Ketchup".
Developers Pocketpair insist that they're original creations. In a blog from earlier this month, translated by our guides writer Jeremy Blum, CEO Takuro Mizobe argued that "many people say that PalWorld is just a plagiarised game, but it has special novelties in it, like how Genshin Impact differs from Breath of the Wild". But the internet teems nonetheless with speculation that Palworld is actively infringing Pokémon's copyright, spurred partly by Palworld's genuinely astounding sales success. It's the second game in Steam's history to exceed two million concurrent players.
Much of the copyright infringement chat is just the usual drive-by tweeting, but some of the accusations are more in earnest. One anonymous Xitter user has shared videos and images comparing models from each game, which have been proffered by several game developers as being indicative of plagiarism of in-game assets.
When we sought perspective from lawyers earlier this week, however, they suggested that Nintendo and the Pokémon Company would struggle to win a court case against
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