One of the industry’s biggest companies is apparently making two Palworld-like games.
Palworld is already the biggest surprise hit of 2024. Few people had the survival game, colloquially referred to as “Pokémon with guns”, on their radar. Absolutely nobody saw the massive success coming, with the game attracting over 25 million players in just a few weeks.
It was inevitable then that the video game industry would try to double down on this phenomenon by making their own games in the Palworld mold. According to a new report by Bloomberg, Chinese conglomerate Tencent is leading the charge and is already hard at work to create multiple titles inspired by Palworld.
Tencent Working On Mobile Games Inspired By Palworld
Two of Tencent’s development studios, Timi (Honor of Kings) and Lightspeed (Peacekeeper Elite), are working on mobile games that are supposed to capture the Palworld hype. These new titles are set to be survival games “in the style of genre-blender Palworld”, meaning animal companions, building, and crass, stylized violence.
The report suggests that Tencent, one of the most valuable publicly traded companies in China, “badly needs a mega-hit”. Its gaming sector saw a 2% decline last quarter and the company is facing a potentially tumultuous future, thanks to competitive markets in the AI and cloud sector and continuous decline of long-running hits like Honor of Kings.
PocketPair, the developer behind Palworld, has demonstrated how a small team with a fairly limited budget can create a hugely successful game. Palworld reportedly had a team of roughly 50 people working on it, with a budget of $6.7 million. That is not a lot in the video game industry, if you look at how expensive some games of similar popularity are.
Replicating that kind of success story could definitely bring a big boost in a competitive market, and Tencent seems to be dead set on trying to beat everyone to the chase.
More details on these two games are currently unavailable. It’s not even clear whether both will see the light of day, as Tencent uses “multiple, competing projects to breed the best results”, a process which previously spawned some of their most successful titles.