Upcoming Palworld Clone May Not Be Developed By Who You Think

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As is to be expected following its successful launch, more games in the style of are in development. Upon its release in January on Steam Early Access and Xbox Game Preview, there was plenty of controversy surrounding how similar some of 's «Pals» were to Pokémon, resulting in The Pokémon Company launching a copy investigation, although 's developer, Pocket Pair, insisted that its game is much closer to survival sandbox titles such as and and passed several legal checks before its release.

While many would have assumed that small indie companies — not too dissimilar to Pocket Pair, which itself only has under 50 employees according to the company's LinkedIn page — would have been the first to try to copy 's success with a string of survival-based titles featuring collectible cartoon monsters, it looks like one of the biggest games companies in the world, Tencent Holdings Ltd. is trying to get in on the action first. According to Bloomberg, two of Tencent's most accomplished creative studios, Timi and Lightspeed are both building mobile games in the style of to power Tencent’s next wave of growth.

According to Bloomberg, Tencent reported a 2% decline in games revenue in the 2023 holiday quarter, as its rival NetEase Inc.’s has cornered the market for a new genre of party games. Since then, Tencent has been strategically shifting many of its resources, incubating multiple, competing projects to breed the best results. This recently led to reports that the China-based mobile title,, which Tencent was developing alongside Ubisoft, was delayed into 2025 to focus on Tencent's competitor, .

With also recently dropping to a new historical low in terms of domestic iOS sales, it's clear that Tencent has seen the success Pocket Pair has seen with, which was made with a small team with limited resources but saw a peak of over 2 million simultaneous players, and sees it as a way to get out of its slump. Timi and Lightspeed have achieved great results for Tencent in the past,