Palworld gained an unexpected amount of popularity early on, as the appeal of shooting your own “Pokémon'' gained mainstream attention from plenty of curious players. It seems that the folks at Pocket Pair, Inc. want to capitalize on this, as they’ve teamed with Sony and Aniplex to form a multimedia company.
An official press release from Sony (via Gematsu) confirms that they’ve collaborated on a joint venture to expand on the survival game’s popularity. Forming Palworld Entertainment, this new company will attempt to bring this franchise to other forms of media, though nothing concrete was confirmed.
Because Aniplex is involved, we can assume that some sort of anime will be in the works to try and compete with the ridiculously popular Pokémon. Once again, nothing has been confirmed, but Aniplex publishes popular anime like Demon Slayer so we should expect something to come from this.
It will be interesting to see if Palworld ends up succeeding in other media, as few gaming properties have been able to reach the same heights as Pokémon. The game’s more mature content does suggest that this should be aimed at pre-teens and teenagers, similar to previous rival Digimon.
While it didn’t reach the same heights as Pokémon, Digimon still proved to be a worthy rival and was able to succeed in other media. The various Digimon anime have been pretty successful, even getting a reboot in 2020 and a number of movies that are related to Bandai’s older shows.
Many deemed it as a fad, but Palworld is still a fairly successful game, with thousands of players still logging into the survival sim. It also helps that Pocket Pair have been pretty consistent with the game’s updates, constantly adding new battles and Pals to keep fans busy.
Palworld is readily available on Xbox One, Xbox Series, and PC. There are rumours of the game coming to PlayStation 5 and that could end up happening now that Sony is involved.