The Pokemon Company lends its voice to the Palworld video game

A real sales event and an unacceptable trend on social networks. In six days of marketing, the Palworld video game, Created by Japanese studio PocketPair, has already sold over 8 million on PC. It broke historical audience records, and generated thousands of videos on YouTube and Twitch. Its principle is simple: offer players the possibility to exploit, cook or even kill “friends » Monsters with guns, to survive on an island.

The cute story leads to a big problem: these creatures are heavily inspired by Nintendo’s Pokemon. From there being able to accuse PocketPair of plagiarism? The Pokemon Company, the joint venture that manages the Pokemon franchise worldwide, wants to know. In a press release published on Thursday, January 25, she explained that she had received“

Several requests regarding the game from another company released in January 2024 “ Before continuing: “ We intend to take appropriate action to investigate and remedy any acts that infringe our intellectual property rights. »

The first images of the Palworld trailer, released seven months ago, had already sparked many reactions to the striking similarities between the two universes. Some wonder if the studio hasn’t used advances in generative artificial intelligence (AI) to replicate the designs of Pokemon monsters pure and simple, for example by using software like Midjourney or Dall-E, which allows its users to create fake images through written requests. allows.

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Copyright Violation »

The game’s creator, Takuro Mizube, has often expressed his fascination with artificial intelligence (AI), which he sees as a way to end what he sees as limitations caused by copyright. His comments fueled suspicions of multiple plagiarism in palworld on the social network today.As revealed by Internet users, the game already emulates gameplay elements from The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild (Nintendo) and Alden Ring È (Bandai Namco)..

The Pokemon Company’s press release is also intended as a warning to tempt developers to go too far in copying Pokemon games. On January 23, Nintendo had already worked against a mod project (the name given to a game modification proposed by a third-party developer), which aimed to visually replace “Pals” with official Pokémon. At the root of this project, Australian YouTuber Toasted. His YouTube video later saw his mod project removed from the platform “ Copyright infringement »From Nintendo.

“Defamatory Tweets”

As reported by the site Vice, the Palworld game modding community does not want to attract the wrath of Nintendo and the Pokemon Company, which is known for being extremely controversial. Nexworld, a server that allows developers to upload their mods, has undertaken to remove pages referencing Palworld modifications to include “real” Pokémon.

On his X account (formerly Twitter), Takuro Mizobe condemned the harassment his teams were subjected to by Pokémon fans. “ We are currently receiving defamatory tweets against our artists, some of which amount to death threats. »It describes. “ I would appreciate it if you would refrain from criticizing the artists associated with Palworld », he adds. The creator also defended his artistic vision. “ Base building is unique in Palworld, drawing inspiration from real-time strategy (RTS) games and management games such as Automation (a game about building and managing an automobile company, editor’s note). »Takuro Mizube detailed in press.

Indeed, on Palworld, players have the possibility to do whatever they want. For example, they can create job chains where their “partners” are tasked with making weapons. Or use these same creatures as projectiles to defeat their opponents… It’s on this freedom that the game’s popularity, especially on platforms like Twitch, seems to depend.

Available in beta version

So, will Palworld’s success last or be fleeting? It’s hard to know, but the current buzz may have largely contributed to the release of PocketPair Studios. The latter is used to put on potential sales games to attract attention, but without completing their development.

Paulward is the studio’s fourth game available in beta, and no final release date has been announced. In contrast, PocketPair has already announced that it is working on its next 2D game. Visually, the latter is heavily inspired by another game released in 2017, called Hollow Knight.