"Nothing's happening at the moment," John "Bucky" Buckley said, though he added: "We're still always thinking about these things."
Palworld blew up big in 2024, becoming only the second game in Steam history to hit more than 2 million concurrent players (along with PUBG and, later that same year, Black Myth: Wukong). That kind of success put a big target on developer Pocketpair, drawing fraudulent claims of AI use and plagiarism, heaps of abuse from gamers, and a patent lawsuit from Nintendo.
That’s not the only type of attention the open world creature-collecting game got, though.
“Pretty quickly after Palworld was released, everyone under the sun pitched us every idea you can imagine,” said Palworld communications director John “Bucky” Buckley when we talked at the Game Developers Conference in San Francisco last week.
“From Palworld movies to Palworld TV shows, Palworld merch, Palworld, you know, everything was pitched at one point,” he said.
Considering how many movies and TV shows based on games are currently in development, from Vampire Survivors to Pacific Drive to Split Fiction, I’m not surprised. According to Buckley, Pocketpair has had “a lot of conversations about it, a lot of discussions about it, a lot of: ‘what would you do? How would you do it? Who’s the right person for it?'”
But for now, there’s no news about a Palworld TV series or movie or any other transmedia spinoff. “Nothing’s happening at the moment,” Buckley said, though he added: “We’re still always thinking about these things.”
So, is there at least hope for eager Palworld fans that they might someday get a TV series or movie based on their favorite Pals?
After all, the April Fools joke Pocketpair pulled last year, featuring a video of a Palworld dating game visual novel, proved these characters look pretty good in anime form.
“We formed that joint venture with Aniplex last year to do non-game IP stuff,” Buckley said. “And Aniplex is obviously one of the biggest anime companies on the planet, and they’re helping us with merchandise now, which is amazing. Maybe in the future, we might get them to help with other stuff. But at the moment merch seems to be the best option first.”
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