The former chief legal officer of The Pokémon Company has called Palworld “ripoff nonsense”.
Speaking to Stephen Totilo at Game File, Don McGowan, former chief legal officer at The Pokémon Company, said that he’s surprised the game got this far.
“This looks like the usual ripoff nonsense that I would see a thousand times a year when I was chief legal officer of Pokémon. I’m just surprised it [Palworld] got this far,” McGowan said.
The early access release of Palworld has been met with controversy, with several people discussing the perceived similarities between creatures in Palworld and creatures that can be found in Pokémon games.
The game has already sold five million copies on Steam in a mere four days. As of January 21, the game had more concurrent players on Steam than games such as Cyberpunk 2077, Baldur’s Gate 3, Hogwarts Legacy, and New World.
Despite McGowan’s comments on the game, the CEO of developer Pocketpair, Takuro Mizobe, doesn’t believe that there’s anything to worry about. In a statement to Automaton, Mizobe spoke about the company’s stance on plagiarism.
“We make our games very seriously, and we have absolutely no intention of infringing upon the intellectual property of other companies,” Mizobe said.
Mizobe has also spoken about accusations of plagiarism that have been leveled against the company (in a translation provided by VGC).
“We are currently receiving abusive and defamatory comments against our artists, in addition to tweets that appear to be death threats. While we have received various opinions about Palworld, it is important to note that the supervision of all materials related to Palworld is conducted by a team, including myself,” the developer said on X (formerly Twitter).
David Hansel, intellectual property and digital media lawyer at Hansel Henson told VGC that it’s “down to Nintendo to absolutely prove copying”.
“It’s got to be obvious copying: you look at one picture, and you look at the other alongside it. The industry would’ve come to an end years ago if you weren’t allowed to take influence. You can’t have a monopoly on a certain style of artwork. It literally has to be copying,” Hansel said.
In other gaming news, a new DRM update to several Capcom games, including Monster Hunter Rise, has stopped the titles from working on the Steam Deck.