When Pocketpair’s monster capturing survival adventure Palworld launched, many people compared it to Pokemon, specificallycalling it “Pokemon with guns.” It’s not Pocketpair’s favorite comparison, according to communications director John ‘Bucky’ Buckley, but the thought of collecting a following of adorable monsters has nonetheless prompted a number of people to ask if Palworld would ever make it to Pokemon’s platform of choice, the Nintendo Switch.
Unfortunately, according to Buckley, that’s not in the cards, largely due to technical reasons. “If we could make the game work on the Switch, we would, but Palworld is a beefy game.”
I spoke to Buckley at the Game Developers Conference in San Francisco last week following his talk, ‘Community Management Summit: A Palworld Roller Coaster: Surviving the Drop.’ During our chat, I also asked Buckley about the possibility of a Nintendo Switch 2 release. He said that Pocketpair is interested, but hasn’t gotten a chance to see if a port is even possible yet.
“We haven’t seen those specs yet,” he said. “Like everyone else, we’re waiting. I’m walking around GDC hoping someone will tell me them, but everyone I’ve spoken to says they haven’t even seen them.
“If it’s beefy enough, it’s 100% worth considering. We did a lot of optimization for Steam Deck, which we were really happy with. Still work to do, but we’re really happy with how it turned out. So we would like to get it on more handhelds if possible.”
Pocketpair remains entangled in a lawsuit from Nintendo over alleged patent infringement against Pokemon’s ball-throwing mechanics, leading some to speculate that to be the actual reason Palworld hadn’t made it to Switch.
But the lawsuit isn’t really what’s stopping the studio from releasing games on Nintendo’s platforms, as we saw back in January. Buckley addressed the lawsuit very briefly in his GDC talk, saying that it caught the team by surprise, and that the team had done numerous legal checks in the lead-up to release in order to prevent that exact thing. “Pretty much everyone at Pocketpair is a huge fan [of Pokemon],” Buckley said in the talk, “so it was a very depressing day, everyone heads down and walking in the rain.”
The question is, would Nintendo allow a game it’s taken such issue with on its next-gen console?
We’ll be posting our full interview with Buckley at GDC later this week, so keep checking back for more about Palworld. In the meantime, it’s a great time to revisit Palworld if you’ve stepped away, as the game just got cross-platform play in a new update last week.
Rebekah Valentine is a senior reporter for IGN. You can find her posting on BlueSky @duckvalentine.bsky.social. Got a story tip? Send it to [email protected].
