UPDATE (19/09/24, 10:00 AM BST): Pocketpair has issued a statement on the lawsuit filing via Palworld's official Twitter account. It reads as follows:
Those of you worried that Palworld will go the full live-service route likely don't need to be, as developer Pocketpair has no plans to make it free-to-play.
Palworld is the kind of game that's pretty perfectly poised to go free-to-play if it wanted to, as all those sales certainly put it in a strong position for a good long while. Many games of its ilk typically are free-to-play these days, opting for microtransactions and DLC as the main form of revenue, but in a recent interview with ASCII Japan (as translated by Automaton), Pocketpair CEO Takuro Mizobe was asked about whether Palworld will switch to the live-service model in its lifetime.
"When you think about it from a business perspective, making [Palworld] a live-service game would extend its lifespan and make it more stable in terms of profitability," Mizobe said. "However, the game was not initially designed with that approach in mind, so there would be many challenges involved in taking it down the live-service path." He also pointed out how games like PUBG and Fall Guys managed to successfully switch to a free-to-play model, but noted that both of them "took several years to make the shift. While I understand that the live-service model is good for business, it’s not that easy."
