Palworld made a significant splash upon its release in 2024, captivating audiences with its unique concept of blending creature collection with combat elements. This success prompted its developer, Pocketpair, to establish its own publishing division. The creation of this new publishing branch quickly gained traction, amassing 150 game proposals within just one week of its announcement. However, John ‘Bucky’ Buckley, the communications director and publishing manager at the studio, disclosed that the influx of pitches began even earlier.
During a conversation with us at GDC 2025, Buckley shared, “No one has money at the moment. Minutes, that’s not even a joke; minutes after Palworld released and that started to happen, people were sending us pitches even though we weren’t a publisher.” He further explained, “I think there was just this desperate, you know, ‘we need money’ that’s going on right now, and a lot of people contacted us.” Surprisingly, he noted that the interest wasn’t limited to smaller developers. “To our surprise, it wasn’t just little two-man teams or something. Some really big names contacted us, you know, AAA, AA, premium indies, all these contacts.”
Even though Pocketpair did not have a formal publishing arm initially, they remained open to pitches from developers: “we started meeting these people very early last year, listening to ideas. And we were very honest. We said, hey, we’re not publishers or anything, but we’ll listen. And we talked about it a lot internally. What can we do? What can we not do?” This openness laid the groundwork for the eventual launch of Pocketpair Publishing. Buckley articulated, “We want to help cool indies get made. We want to help cool, premium indie, kind of AAs get made.”
Buckley also mentioned that Pocketpair Publishing does not yet have a defined niche, stating, “we’re open to anything pitch-wise at the moment.” Nevertheless, he clarified a few clear boundaries, noting, “A few of the very basic no-nos are, you know, no gambling games, anything that’s heavy on crypto or stuff we’re obviously not touching. As far as genres go, we’re very open. Platforms, we’re very open,” adding, “we’re kind of open to helping people with their weird little ideas because they have them.”
Although Palworld will not be making its way to the Nintendo Switch, Buckley did indicate that a potential release on Nintendo Switch 2 is “100% worth considering.”