Palworld or “Pokémon with Guns"?

By Kyle Wyatt

Questions of plagiarism have surrounded the release of a recent video game, Palworld. Since its release in late January, the game has amassed over two million concurrent players and has become the second-highest-played game of all time on Steam, one of the largest digital software distributors in the market. A big reason behind Palworld’s popularity is its striking similarities to the Pokémon franchise. Palworld is structured as an open-world monster-taming survival game where players capture “Pals” with the help of “Pal Spheres,” where Pals are tamed and used in future combat. This formula appears to be almost identical to what has made Pokemon a global phenomenon, except for a few tweaks. 

Palworld takes the mechanics, character proportions, and art style of Pokémon and adds the unexpected. Pals can carry rifles, rocket launchers, and miniguns while being put to work in the player's world. Another feature of the game is industrialization, where players can have Pals work in assembly lines to create goods and fully experience the joys of capitalism. 

The primary area of potential copyright infringement is the world of Pals' design interface within the game. Many of the creatures appear noticeably similar to Pokemon, with some creature models having almost perfect proportions as if they were traced by the development team. Multiple threads on social media platforms have popped up discussing the similarities, with users comparing two characters and noting very little difference.

While the designs are very similar, it’s up to Nintendo whether they want to pursue legal action. It would be an uphill battle to find enough substantial similarities that would win in court. If a Pal’s design was so clearly similar to a copyrighted Pokemon’s design that an ordinary observer wouldn’t be able to tell the difference, the former would be a derivative work and would infringe upon that copyright. Finding that smoking gun would be difficult, and even then it might not be worthwhile for Nintendo to file a lawsuit.

A clear example of plagiarism can be found in Limbo of the Lost, a 2007 point-and-click adventure game for the PC. The game contained nearly identical backgrounds to places in The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion, Diablo II, and a dozen other games. After only a few months following its release, the game was taken off shelves to avoid lawsuits. In this case, there was no possibility of claiming mere inspiration, as essentially everything was just copied from one game to another.

In the 2012 case of Tetris Holding, LLC v. Xio Interactive, Inc., the copyright holders of the Tetris game sued a mobile game studio that drew heavy inspiration from the original game. The mobile app developers initially tried to avoid infringing by adding new audio and gameplay mechanics. The judge ruled in favor of Tetris, stating that in a side-by-side comparison of the two games, if someone had to “squint to find distinctions only at a granular level, then the works are likely to be substantially similar” and there would be infringement. 

Palworld is ultimately a parody, whether the developers are ready to admit it or not. It takes the idea of Pokemon and twists it into an amalgamation that’s both intriguing and shocking. That’s the reason why it has been so successful, and why so many people have flocked to buy a copy. After years of monotonous and boring Pokemon game releases, fans have wanted something new. Palworld successfully capitalizes on this desire.

Images courtesy of Google Images.