Hit survival game Palworld has been so successful for developer Pocketpair that its CEO believes the studio's next game could "go beyond AAA" if it made use of its massive profits, but he isn't interested in doing so.
In a new interview with GameSpark, which has been translated by Automaton (and verified by 12DOVE using Google Translate and DeepL), Pocketpair CEO Takuro Mizobe reveals that Palworld's sales "are in the tens of billions of yen." Mizobe says that the studio developed Palworld using the "proceeds" of its previous games, Craftopia and Overdungeon, but in this case, he believes that Pocketpair just isn't "structured" to handle the scale of the game that Palworld's profits - ten billion yen amounts to more than $70 million - would allow for.
"If we were to develop our next game based on these proceeds, as we have done in the past, not only would the scale go beyond AAA, but we wouldn’t be able to keep up with this in terms of our organization’s maturity, or better put, we aren’t structured for something like that at all," Mizobe says.
Again though, pursuing a massive scale game like this isn't something that Mizobe is interested in doing in the first place, as he notes that "there isn't" any game he'd "like to make with such an enormous budget," anyway. Instead, he says: "I want to pursue ideas that are interesting as indie games."
For the time being, of course, Palworld itself still has plenty of growing to do, as it's still in early access. It's already added plenty of new stuff since its launch in January, with the addition of its PvP arena and a whole new island in its Sakurajima update. As of late June, we also knew that the devs were "still discussing" bringing the survival game to more platforms, even if it's unlikely to get a Switch release due to "technical reasons," according to Mizobe, so we'll just have to wait and see if a PlayStation release could be on the cards.
