Pocketpair confirms Palworld isn't turning into a live-service game and won't be free-to-play: 'We are not changing our game's business model'
In an interview with ASCII Japan, translated into English by Automaton Media, Pocketpair CEO Takuro Mizobe was asked about the future of open world creature-collector Palworld, and whether it would make sense to transition to a live-service model.
"When you think about it from a business perspective," Mizobe replied, "making [Palworld] a live-service game would extend its lifespan and make it more stable in terms of profitability. However, the game was not initially designed with that approach in mind, so there would be many challenges involved in taking it down the live-service path".
He also mentioned the difficulty of taking a paid game and making it free-to-play—as many successful live-service games are—without alienating its existing audience. "It is common for live-service games to be F2P with paid elements such as skins and battle passes," he said, "but Palworld is a B2P game, so it's difficult to turn it into a live-service game from the ground up."
Mizobe went on to mention that, while games like PUBG and Fall Guys had successfully made the switch, it clearly wasn't a straightforward matter in either case. "Both took several years to make the shift. While I understand that the live-service model is good for business, it's not that easy."
If that reads to you like someone who entertained the possibility of transitioning Palworld to a free-to-play service game and decided against it for the time being, congratulations on your reading comprehension skills. Some Palworld players, however, thought the opposite, and took to social media to complain about the game they loved becoming a dreaded game-as-a-service.
The discourse got rough enough that Pocketpair was motivated to reply in a post on the bigotry hub formerly known as Twitter. It began by explaining that "this interview was conducted several months ago" and "we have already decided that the F2P/GaaS approach is not suitable for us."
It did suggest other ways of continuing to monetize Palworld, though ones that are entirely theoretical at this point. "We are still considering skins and DLC for Palworld in future as a means to support development, but we will discuss this with you all again as we get closer to that point. For now, our priority remains making Palworld the best game possible."
Pocketpair seems to have been thinking a lot about ways to build on the success of Palworld. As the original interview notes, another plan the studio considered was running in-game ads, though that was wisely ditched given how players on PC would react to it. As Mizobe said, "Steam users hate ads."