Takuro Mizobe’s first game was a meteor-shooter for the Nintendo DS. He built it in 2010, as a student on a one-year Nintendo Game Seminar in Tokyo, and made a point of using both of the handheld’s screens for play. The man who did that now runs Pocketpair, the studio behind Palworld, which Game File called the biggest hit of 2024.
The company was founded in April 2015 and works out of Shinagawa, in Tokyo. Mizobe went to the Tokyo Institute of Technology and, once he had graduated, joined JPMorgan Chase, though he resigned soon afterwards. Half of the first development team were friends he had met at the Nintendo seminar. The other half came from university.
A slow start
Overdungeon, a roguelike card game, reached early access in November 2018. Chinese publisher Lightning Games released it formally the following year, but a dispute over the contract left Pocketpair unable to update it, so the team abandoned the game and moved on to Craftopia. That one entered early access in September 2020 and borrowed freely from Ark: Survival Evolved, Minecraft and Breath of the Wild.
Borrowing is rather the point. Mizobe told Game File that making something wholly new is very hard, and that he tries “to avoid creating new things” where he can. Pocketpair did eventually win back full rights to Overdungeon, which reached the Nintendo Switch on January 9, 2025, with its first update in four years.
Palworld
Work on Palworld began six months after Craftopia went into early access, and the staff grew considerably. Palworld was unveiled at INDIE Live Expo in June 2021, with a target of roughly a year. It missed that, and then missed August 2023 as well. A network test ran in November 2023. Early access finally opened in January 2024 on Windows and Xbox consoles, with PlayStation 5 following in September.
Players catch creatures called Pals, put them to work building bases and use them to survive in an Ark-style world. Mizobe had said before launch that Pokémon was an influence, Ark a bigger one. The numbers were large. The game peaked at more than two million concurrent players, and Pocketpair said it sold 15 million copies on PC in its first month, while 10 million people tried it on Xbox through Game Pass.
After the hit
Success brought partners and a lawsuit. In July 2024 Pocketpair set up Palworld Entertainment with Sony Music Entertainment Japan and Aniplex to handle licensing and merchandise, leaving development and distribution out of it. In September, The Pokémon Company and Nintendo sued in Tokyo over patents, seeking an injunction and damages of 10 million yen. Pocketpair said it was disappointed and would defend itself.
The business carried on regardless. Krafton’s PUBG Studios was handed the job of adapting Palworld for mobile in October 2024, and in January 2025 Pocketpair launched a publishing arm for smaller developers. Its first project was Dead Take, a horror game from Surgent Studios, a team that had earlier paused development over money trouble.
Sources
- Palworld's Takuro Mizobe wants Ark-style PvP in Pocketpair's survival hit (Game File)
- "Pokémon" vs "Palworld": Nintendo sues Pocketpair (heise online)
