Nintendo really SHOULD be afraid of Palworld
In two years Palworld went from a viral hit to a new MMO, a trading card game with $4,000 eBay cards, and a media deal with Sony’s anime arm. Pokémon still dwarfs it. But Minecraft and Fortnite were newcomers once too, and Palworld has already changed what fans expect from Pokémon.
Palworld is two and a half years old. In the last week alone it announced an MMO and launched a trading card game whose rarest cards are already selling for four thousand dollars.
Pokémon is still the biggest entertainment franchise on the planet, and it isn’t close. The gap is enormous. What should catch your eye is how fast Pocketpair keeps shrinking it.
The rapid growth is the real story
Palworld launched in January 2024 and hit 25 million players in a month. It’s now past 40 million, more than Pokémon’s best-selling games have managed, and its full 1.0 version landed this year.
That would be a nice story on its own. The empire-building around it is what should raise eyebrows.
On August 3, Pocketpair announced Palworld Online, a mobile MMO built with Garena. Three days earlier, on July 30, the Palworld trading card game launched and moved 3.5 million packs on day one. Its chase cards started appearing on eBay for four figures before the set was even on shelves.
There’s real-world merch. There’s a cozy farming spinoff. There are crossovers with other games. And there’s Palworld Entertainment, a joint venture Pocketpair formed with Sony‘s anime powerhouse Aniplex, which is the kind of deal you make when an anime and a media empire are the plan.
Two years. A hit game, an MMO, a card game, a media company. That’s not a normal pace.
The honest caveats
The gap really is enormous, and it’s only fair to sit with that for a second.
Pokémon has made something like $90 billion across its lifetime. It’s the highest-grossing franchise in history, bigger than Star Wars, bigger than Marvel. The Pokémon card game alone dwarfs anything Palworld has done.
Nintendo could lose the entire Palworld threat tomorrow and not feel it on a balance sheet.
The MMO news comes with an asterisk too. Palworld Online is mobile, and Garena is building it under license, not Pocketpair’s main team.
Mobile MMOs aimed largely at the Asian market are a different animal than the console smash that made Palworld famous. It counts as growth. It just isn’t the flagship.
So yes, Palworld has a long, long way to go. Everyone saying that is correct.
The problem with “a long way to go”
That reassurance has a hole in it.
Minecraft was a weird little indie sandbox once. Now it’s the best-selling game ever made and, as of last year, a billion-dollar movie. Fortnite came out of nowhere in 2017 and turned into a cultural operating system that hosts concerts and crossovers with everything. Both went from newcomer to unavoidable in about a decade.
Nobody watching either of them in year two thought they were looking at the future. They were.
Palworld is in year two, moving faster than either of those did, with a media conglomerate already attached. Give it ten years, and “a long way to go” turns into a countdown.
The lawsuit nobody quite believes is only about patents
Which brings up the elephant. In September 2024, Nintendo and The Pokémon Company sued Pocketpair.
Read the suit and it’s narrower than the memes assume. It’s a patent case, aimed at gameplay mechanics like the way you catch and summon creatures.
It has nothing to do with the Pals resembling Pokémon, which is what everyone assumed going in.
Pocketpair has already confirmed it changed mechanics in multiple patches specifically because of the litigation, burning development time reworking systems to route around Nintendo’s patents.
The official story is intellectual property protection, and that’s a legitimate thing to protect. The timing invites a less flattering read, though, and plenty of people have made it.
If a small studio is suddenly the most exciting thing in your genre, a patent fight that forces them to spend months re-engineering their own game is a very efficient way to slow the car down. That’s speculation, to be fair.
Nintendo says patents. It’s just not hard to see why the theory caught on.
The real thing Nintendo should fear
Strip all of it away, the MMO, the cards, the lawsuit, and the actual threat is simpler and a lot harder to sue.
Palworld proved something Pokémon fans had suspected for years. A small studio, on a fraction of the budget, delivered the ambitious open-world creature-collector that the mainline Pokémon games kept not making. It arrived the same era that Pokémon Scarlet and Violet shipped looking technically rough, and the contrast did the rest.
The danger to Nintendo was never about revenue. Forty million people got a taste of what this genre can be when someone actually swings for it, and now they know.
Pokémon is still winning, and probably will for a very long time. What Palworld took away was the easy version of winning. Game Freak can’t coast on the logo anymore, because the audience has seen the alternative and liked it.
Nintendo can sue Pocketpair over patents all it wants. It can’t sue its own fans back into being satisfied.
Article compiled and edited by Derek Gibbs (entertainment editor) and the Clownfish TV newsroom.
D/REZZED is part of Clownfish TV. For more news, views, and rants on gaming, tech, and pop culture, visit clownfishtv.com. Watch the show on YouTube at @ClownfishTV where new episodes drop daily. Subscribe to the Clownfish TV podcast on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, iHeart, and wherever else you get your podcasts. Sign up for the free newsletter at more.clownfishtv.com.
Hat Tips:
Forbes / Inven Global / Anime News Network — the August 3 Palworld Online MMO announcement, the Garena license, and the mobile caveat
GamesRadar / GosuGamers — the July 30 TCG launch, the 3.5 million day-one packs, and the $4,000 eBay chase cards
Anime News Network — Palworld’s launch numbers, the 40-million player figure, the Palworld Entertainment JV with Sony and Aniplex, and the status of the Nintendo patent suit
Anime News Network / MMORPG.com — the Pocketpair spinoffs, the Krafton and Bushiroad deals, and the confirmed patch changes tied to the litigation