Addressing Palworld Dev Pocketpair's Recent Announcement on Craftopia

A little over a week ago, Palworld's developer, Pocketpair, announced their intention to fully release Craftopia by 2027. This announcement was made alongside the game's 6th Anniversary Update, so I was able to notice and respond to it quickly. While I didn't say everything I could have, I expressed my skepticism regarding various parts of the announcement, pointed out they had a lot to answer for beyond fully releasing Craftopia, and left it at that while hoping I wouldn't need to write an article about it.

However, some Pocketpair fans are already weaponizing the announcement (I can't link to replies on reviews, so you'll need to scroll down on the second link) to shut down criticism and concerns about Craftopia and its future. Considering the lengthy article I wrote recently about Pocketpair, I could see fans using this announcement as a new counterpoint, even though the counterpoint itself is weak for reasons I'll soon explain. More importantly, it would also be a serious disservice to you readers if I failed to acknowledge Pocketpair's statements when they're addressing a major concern so soon after I thoroughly criticized them.

 

Therefore, I have written this article about the announcement, which will primarily serve as an addendum to the "Addressing Possible Counterpoints" section in my previous article. In this article, I will review Pocketpair's announcement regarding Craftopia's future, explain why I'm skeptical of it, and support that with evidence. I will then conclude by addressing the counterpoint more directly and discussing why a high quality 1.0 release of Craftopia is important for the company.

This Article Is About Pocketpair's Uniquely Questionable Game Dev Practices

Disclaimer: Please read the entire article first, especially the concluding section. You can crucify me afterward if you want, especially for any mistakes I made in the article.

 

Update (9/11/2026): After seeing Pocketpair fans use Pocketpair's recent announcement to shield the company against further criticism and noticing how many people are taking the company's statements at face value, I have reconsidered and am now working on a short article about that recent announcement. I will leave the previous update for posterity and add a link to the article here when it's finished.

 

Update (9/7/2026): Pocketpair announced that they are planning to fully release Craftopia next year. I don't plan to write an article about this, but I wanted to acknowledge that this announcement happened. In terms of what I wanted Pocketpair to do in my Closing Thoughts section, the current 1.0 plan, which is fairly vague and lacks a definitive roadmap, does not fulfill my demand for Pocketpair to "properly finish the development of Craftopia". Their announcement is even harder to take seriously when considering that the 6th anniversary update, which was a great opportunity to start their stated goal of refining and polishing the game, just added a tiny amount of content instead. I left a comment expressing my skepticism at whether they can even achieve what they're planning in a significant, meaningful way by 2027. It's also worrying how many replies simply take the announcement at face value; I wish I had the optimism those posters have. Aside from that, I fixed up this article by addressing some spelling and grammar errors and improving the clarity of some statements to better convey my points.

 

Recently, Palworld received its 1.0 update, officially exiting Early Access after about 2.5 years. The developer, Pocketpair, announced their intention to fully release the game last year and announced a date roughly one month before the full release.

While this release is not surprising and seems to be heavily celebrated based on the reviews and comments on various news announcements for the game, I'm personally a little upset. This is because Pocketpair is also the game developer of Craftopia, a game I naïvely pointed to as a potentially decent open world-esque alternative when discussing the game design issues of Genshin Impact. While some great open world games did fully release (or are at least near full release) later on, Craftopia has instead languished in Early Access for nearly 6 years.

Around when Palworld entered Early Access, I played Craftopia, then I played Palworld itself a few months later. While I had fun playing both games and saw their potential, I was ultimately frustrated and concerned by how much worse off the former game was despite how much longer it had been in development. Because I was aware of Pocketpair's history regarding how they handled their first game, Overdungeon, which I will explain in further detail later, I started to gather information about the company. The results of this research deepened my outrage, but I reasoned that Craftopia's development would surge forward by leaps and bounds with the new revenue from Palworld's success. Therefore, I shelved what I learned in the form of an article draft on this blog and hoped I'd never have to make use of the information.

 

Unfortunately, Palworld has now fully released before Craftopia has even left the alpha state of development by the developer's own admission. Furthermore, Pocketpair has intentions to release more games and while they definitely have the staff to support such projects, it's unusual and concerning that the future of their second oldest game remains uncertain.

 

I believe Pocketpair's game development practices are uniquely questionable to the point that more people should scrutinize and criticize them. This article will attempt to accomplish that by laying out the facts I've gathered along with my interpretations of that evidence. I will then address counterpoints made by fans, including potential future ones, and explain why Pocketpair's practices are problematic, particularly in the broader sense of affecting the gaming industry as a whole.

Granblue Fantasy: Relink Suggestion Compilation, With New Foreword and Afterword

Disclaimer: No, I didn't steal this. Max Depravity is another alias I use. I even took the rare step of posting the Google Doc on Reddit under my usual username.

 

7/10/26: I fixed the Afterword a bit to clarify my points better.

Foreword

 

As I mentioned in my last article, I'm reposting my Granblue Fantasy: Relink suggestion compilation to this blog to better preserve it and I wanted to do it before the upcoming expansion, Endless Ragnarok, releases. I had to paste the content of the entire Google Doc without formatting, then re-add the formatting to properly work with this blog. I fixed some mistakes such as bad grammar and missing words, but the actual suggestions themselves have not been changed. Also, I had the misfortune of learning most header formats don't work properly due to my blog theme, so I'm only using Major Header and resizing text for section and subsection titles like I used to do.

 

As for the suggestions themselves, I think they as a whole are still solid even a couple of years later. However, I should have acknowledged the influence of more games on my suggestions. For example, the Boss Rush suggestion was definitely influenced by Hades and similar roguelite games. Meanwhile, Rogue Mode Exploration and Expeditions also drew inspiration from games such as Risk of Rain 2.

 

What follows is the original contents of my suggestion compilation with the fixes I mentioned. Also, for those who are curious, Cygames was accepting feedback on Relink and I did send them the entire Google Doc as my feedback shortly after posting it on Reddit.