Palworld devs say they could venture 'beyond triple-a', but won't - Skull and Bones retains quadruple-a throne

Unsurprisingly, Palworld is making a whole bunch of money, but that doesn't mean PocketPair is suddenly going to switch to triple-a games.

Palworld isn't quite as widely spoken about as it was at the start of the year, but that doesn't mean it isn't doing well still. In fact, it sounds like it's printing money, at least according to PocketPair CEO Takuro Mizobe who recently spoke about the developer's plans in an interview with GameSpark (as translated by Automaton). It's pretty normal for studios to want to expand and hire more hands when they have a hit on their hands, but Mizobe said that PocketPair wants to see how far it can go while keeping development "on an indie scale." He went on to say, "Looking at global trends for triple-a games, it’s become difficult to develop a game with a large team and ensure it becomes a hit."

While Palworld was likely the game that put PocketPair on your radar, it has been making games for a while now. In fact, the success of its previous games is what let it make Palworld in the first place. Its much smaller title Overdungeon being successful meant it could make Craftopia, the success of which meant it could go on to work on Palworld. But Mizobe says that PocketPair isn't going to keep up this "snowball effect" for future games.

"Although we don’t talk about it publicly, sales of Palworld are in the tens of billions of yen. 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 triple-a, 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." Sounds like Skull and Bones is keeping its quadruple-a throne for now.

Mizobe doesn't seem to be all that interested in triple-a or quadruple-a titles anyway, explaining, "if you ask me if there’s any game I would like to make with such an enormous budget, there isn’t. I want to pursue ideas that are interesting as indie games."

So even if Palworld isn't the most original in places, at least it'll always have an indie heart to it (and besides, The Pokemon Company never did anything about the plagiarism claims anyway, it seems).