When Pocket Pair monsters were released that captured the Survival Adventure Pal World, many people particularly called them “Pokemon with their guns” compared to Pokemon. According to Communications Director John ‘Bucky’ Buckley, it’s not a Pocket Pair favorite comparison, but the idea of collecting adorable monster followers asked many people if Palworld would reach the Nintendo Switch, the Pokémon platform.
Unfortunately, according to Buckley, that’s not primarily due to technical reasons. “If we can get the game to work on the Switch, we will, but Palworld is a fierce game.”
I spoke with Buckley last week at a Game Developer Conference in San Francisco, following the “Community Management Summit: Palworld Roller Coaster: Survival of the Drop.” During the chat, I also asked Buckley about the possibility of the Nintendo Switch 2 release. He said PocketPair is interested, but hasn’t got a chance to see if the port is still possible.
“We haven’t seen these specs yet,” he said. “We’re waiting, just like everyone else. I’m walking around the GDC.
“If it’s physical enough, it’s 100% worth considering. We did a lot of optimizations for the steam deck. It was really satisfying. It’s still something to do, but we’re really happy with how it turned out.
Pocket Pair remains caught up in a lawsuit from Nintendo over alleged patent infringement against the Pokémon ball-throwing mechanic, and some speculate that it is the real reason Palworld didn’t actually switch.
However, as we saw in January, the lawsuit doesn’t actually prevent the studio from releasing games on Nintendo’s platform. Buckley said in his GDC speech he worked on the lawsuit very easily, and that the team captured the surprises and conducted numerous legal checks on the release to prevent it being accurate. “Most people in Pocket Pair are huge fans (of Pokemon),” Buckley said in his speech.
The question is, will Nintendo allow games with such issues on the next generation console?
We’ll be posting a full interview with Buckley at GDC later this week, so check out Palworld for more details. In the meantime, last week’s new update got the game cross-platform play, so if you leave, it’s the perfect time to revisit Palworld.
Rebekah Valentine is a senior reporter at Passthecontroller. You can find her posts at Bluesky @Duckvalentine.bsky.social. Do you have any tips for the story? Send to [email protected].
