‘Palworld’ was peachy no matter how you looked at it. The game, one of the first games of a company that describes itself as “indie”, managed to become one of the most played games in Steam history. To this we will have to add sales on consoles and soon downloads on mobile phones. Because yes, ‘Palworld’ for mobile phones is a reality and is already in development.

Palworld’s success. To give us an idea of ​​how relevant this title is, ‘Palworld’ is the third most played game in PC history with 2.1 million concurrent users. Today the number of participants is much lower (24,000 peak in the last 24 hours), but the milestone is still there. In fact, until the arrival of ‘Dark Legend Wukong’, he was in second place, not third. It sold 15 million copies in the first month on Steam and reached 10 million users on Xbox.

Licenses. Just a few months ago, Pocketpair, the company behind ‘Palworld’, announced the formation of Palworld Entertainment along with Sony Music Entertainment and Aniplex. They announced in July that the aim of this partnership was to promote ‘Palworld’s licensing business both domestically and internationally. It looks like the results are already starting to come.

mobile time. Pocketpair and Krafton have teamed up to bring ‘Palworld’ to smartphones. If the name sounds familiar, Krafton is the company behind ‘PUBG’ and ‘PUBG Mobile’. The following statements were made in Krafton’s statement published on its website:

“Through this agreement, Krafton is expanding the ‘Palworld’ IP to mobile platforms. We plan to faithfully reinterpret and implement the main entertaining elements of the original work to adapt them for mobile. The project will be led by the PUBG STUDIOS development team, a Krafton creative studio.”

‘Palworld’ screenshot | Image: Pocketpair

What can we expect? A. portabsolutely not. Krafton talks about “reinterpreting” it, so we’re likely to see a multiplayer survival game based on the ‘Palworld’ universe. In any case, we will have to wait to clear our doubts. The development was announced today and these things take time. There’s no release date, not even a tentative one.

Nintendo’s case. This announcement interestingly comes just days after Pocketpair was sued by Nintendo for patent infringement. The truth is that this was a rather mysterious request. According to Nintendo, ‘Palworld’ “infringes multiple patent rights” but does not specify which ones. What we do know is that Nintendo has patented mechanics like the act of throwing something to fight, influence, or capture it (c’mon, Poké Balls mechanics). ‘Palworld’ also has a similar system, but the truth is that we do not know which patents ‘Palworld’ has infringed.

In this sense, the company assured that “we will initiate legal proceedings and related investigations regarding allegations of patent infringement”, but added that “at this time, we are unaware of the specific patents that we are accused of infringing, and these details have not been communicated to us.”

‘Palworld’ screenshot | Image: Pocketpair

The importance of mobile. Be that as it may, the truth is that this launch is very significant worldwide. There’s an obvious reason why the mobile phone is one of the most popular devices for gaming: Everyone has a mobile phone, but not everyone has a gaming computer or console. If we give a figure beyond this, it is easy to understand that licenses want to take place on mobile phones: 89.9 billion.

What about? From ducks? No, not a duck. $89.9 billion. This is the amount of money generated by mobile games worldwide in 2023 alone, with mobile games representing almost half, or 49%, of the revenue generated by the video game market. Games on consoles generated 52.4% (52.4 billion) and games on PC 22% (39.6 billion, meanwhile, up 8% from 2022).

The mobile market is a very attractive market for one simple reason: It generates a lot of money. Being a video game developer, having a strong IP and not having a mobile version is missing out on a huge potential revenue source. The most obvious and current case is ‘Age of Empires: Mobile’, which has long been a PC game and has not been encouraged to have a mobile version until now. Also from the ‘Diablo’ saga, ‘Call of Duty’ or ports Mobiles from ‘Genshin Impact’ and ‘ZZZ’.

Cover image | pocket pair

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