Palworld Pokémon plagiarism accusations pile up as CEO responds

The director of Steam’s colossal breakout hit, Palworld, has responded to allegations of plagiarism, as accusations mount that the game could have copied Pokémon designs.

Since launching into early access on PC and Xbox on Friday, Palworld has become a huge breakout success, with over 5 million sales and more than 1.3 million concurrent Steam players.

However, the survival game’s success ignited discourse around perceived similarities between its character designs and those of the Pokémon games.

Although the actual gameplay of Palworld is vastly different from Nintendo’s series, debate has raged on social media around the obvious influence its character designs have taken from Pokémon, and whether it could be interpreted as plagiarism.

On Monday, the game’s director (and CEO of developer Pocketpair) Takuro Mizobe posted a response to the accusations. While he did not deny any influence from Pokémon, he claimed the game’s artists had received online abuse and called for it to stop.

“We are currently receiving abusive and defamatory comments against our artists, in addition to tweets that appear to be death threats,” he wrote on X, translated by VGC.

“While we have received various opinions about Palworld, it is important to note that the supervision of all materials related to Palworld is conducted by a team, including myself. I bear the responsibility for the produced materials. I would appreciate it if these comments towards artists involved in Palworld would cease.”

However, the accusations against Palworld took another turn on Sunday, when an anonymous X account appeared claiming to show evidence of not just design inspiration, but plagiarism of actual game assets.

User ‘Byo’ posted several videos comparing Palworld’s in-game 3D models to those of Pokémon, and claimed to show evidence that they were likely copied.

While none of the half-dozen models compared by the X user appear to be 1:1 copies, they claimed that their proportions were nearly identical to Pokémon models