What do you think of when you think of Palworld? Unfortunately for the folks who made it, the answer is pretty likely to immediately be, “Pokemon with guns.”
That’s because when the game first exploded into popularity, that’s the shorthand everyone on the internet used for it, likely contributing to its rise thanks to the odd combination of two unlike ideas. Heck, we at IGN are guilty of using the phrase too, just like everyone else. It was convenient and easy for those who had never heard of the game to immediately understand.
But according to Pocketpair communications director and publishing manager John ‘Bucky’ Buckley, “Pokemon with guns” was never intended to be the takeaway. In fact, he says that Pocketpair largely doesn’t love the moniker. He said this in a talk at the Game Developers Conference last month, when he discussed the initial rise to fame of Palworld in 2021.
“We revealed the game to the world in June of 2021, so quite a few years ago. We posted a trailer at what’s called Indie Live Expo, which is an indie gaming event in Japan. We showed this off to the Japanese audience initially, we had a really, really good reception. But very quickly, Western media got eyes on this little game, and we were very quickly branded, as early as 2021, as a ‘certain franchise’ plus guns. This would be something that has stuck with us to this very day, despite our best efforts to shake that off.”
After his talk, I spoke with Buckley in an interview and asked him to elaborate on this. Buckley responded that Pokemon was never really part of the pitch to begin with. Sure, the development team is largely composed of fans of the game, and they clocked the monster-collecting similarities. But the goal was always to be more like ARK: Survival Evolved instead.
“A lot of us are huge ARK people, and our previous game, Craftopia, kind of has some stuff in it that we really loved from ARK and some ideas from ARK,” he said. “So we wanted to just take that and make it bigger. And one of the things about ARK, is that everything’s about the dinosaurs. Some are cute, some are cool. But we wanted to give them more personality, more abilities, more uniqueness. So that was the pitch. The pitch was, let’s make something like ARK, but a lot heavier on the automation and each creature’s like its own very special thing. And then we show that first trailer, and then this title kind of came out. And no, we weren’t super happy about it, but it is what it is.”
I asked Buckley if he thinks the “Pokemon with guns” label helped Palworld become as successful as it was, and he acknowledges it did.
“Yeah, I mean, that was big,” he said. “That was definitely a big thing. Dave [Oshry] from New Blood [Interactive, publisher of Dusk, Fallen Aces, and others] messaged us because he trademarked the website, ‘Pokemonwithguns.com’ and stuff. All this kind of stuff happened, and I’m sure that fueled that fire, which is fair enough.
“But still today, 2025, if people want to say [“Pokemon with guns”], that’s fine. But the thing that upsets us, I guess, a little bit, is the people who firmly believe that’s what the game actually is. But it’s not even remotely like that to play the game. So if you want to say that after playing, that’s fine, but we’d rather everyone give it a bit of a chance first.”
But Buckley also doesn’t feel that Pokemon is even a meaningful source of market competition with Palworld. “I don’t think the audiences cross over that much,” he said, again pointing to ARK as a neater parallel. Even then, though, he doesn’t feel Palworld is fighting with anyone else in particular for an audience of players. Not even Helldivers 2, which he said a “very significant” portion of Palworld players also bought on release.
“I’ve gotten in trouble for ranting about the ‘console wars’ before, but I think the competition in games is kind of manufactured for the sake of it,” he said. “Almost like a meta-marketing kind of strategy. I don’t really think there is competition in games. I mean, there’s so many games right now. How can you be in competition with one or two? It doesn’t really make sense anymore. We’re just always in competition with the timing [of releases] more than anything, I think.”
So if “Pokemon with guns” is out, what tagline would Buckley have had go viral, if he could have had his way?
“I probably would’ve called it, ‘Palworld: It’s Kind of Like ARK if ARK Met Factorio and Happy Tree Friends’ or something like that. That’s how I might’ve said it.”
I told him it doesn’t quite roll off the tongue the same, to which he agrees.
Buckley and I also spoke about the possibility of Palworld coming to the Nintendo Switch 2, whether Pocketpair would ever be acquired, and much more in our interview. You can read the full discussion right here.
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].
