Monday, August 3, 2026

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.
 
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.

Presenting And Interpreting The Facts
 
Over the years, I gathered some evidence related to Pocketpair's development and handling of their games. While this is all public knowledge, some of it might not be so well-known. The facts will be presented in quote boxes with relevant facts grouped together. My interpretation of the facts will be presented below each quote box to explain what I think of these facts and why they are compelling evidence. I will then conclude this section with why I believe Pocketpair's game development practices are uniquely questionable based on the presented facts.

Pocketpair took nearly 4 years to address issues with their first game, Overdungeon. In their announcement explaining the long delay, they stated that they had issues with the publisher. They also stated that they decided to focus on developing Craftopia instead.

First of all, if the publisher, Lightning Games, really was so problematic that the game couldn't be updated, that information should've been communicated sooner through a news announcement on the store page so that players didn't think the game was intentionally abandoned. Pocketpair doesn't appear to have done this until the announcement linked above.
 
Second of all, 4 years is too long to push a fix to the point of being negligent. Assuming the publisher was the problem, addressing a contract issue through a civil dispute shouldn't take that long (factors like the pandemic may have affected how long the dispute would take, but 4 years is still too long). Craftopia also sold well, as I will explain soon, so Pocketpair may have had the leverage to reach a settlement with Lightning Games sooner than usual.
 
In my opinion, the announcement sounds like an excuse that deflects blame. It also sounds like Pocketpair just wanted to focus their resources on developing Craftopia. I believe this is the case because of the following:
  • The publisher issue was not communicated in a timely manner on an easily-discovered public channel such as Overdungeon's news announcements. 
  • The publisher has a stake in a game's success because they receive a cut of the profits, so it makes no sense for them to stop Pocketpair from fixing bugs that detract from Overdungeon's financial success.
    • On a related note, it's uncertain if Lightning Games exerts significant control over game updates anyway since some games published by them do have updates. However, said games are co-published alongside the developer.
  • They took almost 4 years to update Overdungeon when dealing with a contract dispute shouldn't take more than 2 years. It also might have been possible to reach a settlement sooner if Craftopia's success was used as leverage.
In any case, the main takeaway here is that Overdungeon had problems on release, which Pocketpair acknowledged in their announcement. However, in my opinion it took them too long to start fixing issues that included technical problems such as softlocks based on the update notes. It doesn't seem like they were in any rush to fix the game either.
AI: Art Imposter is a small party game developed by Pocketpair for PC, Android, and iOS. While it is an Early Access game, it appears to have received no updates on PC at all, causing it to be considered abandoned by Steam. It also infrequently received updates on other platforms. 
A picture of the Steam page for AI: Art Imposter that shows the game has been abandoned.
 
I initially dismissed this game during the early stages of my investigation into Pocketpair because it seemed like a small, cheap game that was quickly finished. Little did I know that it was a game that the company outright abandoned. Considering that Pocketpair has made four games as of this writing, this means that along with Overdungeon, Pocketpair has at least abandoned or neglected 50% of their games. This already does not make for a good track record and I haven't even brought up the situation surrounding Craftopia yet.
 
On a side note, John Buckley, who is the Head of Publishing and Communication at Pocketpair, stated that the company is opposed to generative AI. While the discussion of generative AI itself is outside of the scope of this article, I do want to point out that it's a tad hypocritical of them to take this stance while they're still selling AI: Art Imposter and Pocketpair may want to delist that game in the near future.
  • Craftopia sold approximately 500,000 copies within a few months of entering Early Access.
    • For context, Gust, a fairly established studio that's been around for decades, took until Atelier Ryza to hit this sort of sales number based on available evidence.
  • Palworld was announced half a year after the sales number tweet shown in the article above. 
  • Craftopia's price was and is 25 dollars, though most copies early on probably sold for 22.5 dollars due to the initial 10% sale. $22.5 x 500,000 = $11,250,000. The USD to JPY exchange rate was approximately $1 to 100¥ back in 2020, meaning that $11,250,000 = 1,1250,000¥.
  • According to Pocketpair, the development cost of Palworld was over 1 billion yen, or approximately 6.67 million USD based on 2024 exchange rates.
I bundled all these facts together because they I think they're all related to each other. Put simply, I think these facts strongly suggest Craftopia's early profits were primarily used to fund Palworld's development up until 2024. While the profits from Craftopia were subject to Steam's cut, taxes, and other expenses like Craftopia developer salaries, the company still had millions of USD or regional equivalent to work with.
 
The reason I take the correlation between Craftopia's early profits and Palworld's development costs so seriously is because unless Pocketpair was receiving significant funding from elsewhere, there probably wasn't much money left to work on Craftopia itself. Considering Craftopia remains an unfinished game while Palworld has been fully released, I think it's reasonable to believe that Craftopia's development could've benefited from more reinvestment of its own profits than it likely received.
 
I'm also far from the only one who made this connection.
About 45 people were hired to work on Palworld prior to the Early Access release (~4 initially, then 40 more over the years). There was also some outsourcing. Within that same period, around 10 people were working on Craftopia with no indication of team growth.
These are the statements in question that confirm the above quote from the provided note.com link. The original text is in Japanese and was run through Google Translator, but the general points being made appear to be correct after I double checked using a dictionary.
This fact further reinforces the idea that Pocketpair was heavily focusing their development resources and efforts on Palworld because they hired a substantial number of employees and claimed to have almost run out of money by the time Palworld was ready to release into Early Access. These details on their own wouldn't be a major issue, but only if Craftopia's development team also received significant attention. However, it appears that the team had minimal growth over the same time period from 2021-2024.
 
On a somewhat related note, a more recent source has John Buckley stating that the entire company had around 30-35 employees in 2024. This appears to contradict the primary source I linked above, but it still supports the notion that the studio had grown quite a bit compared to when it was initially developing Craftopia and the new staff were likely assigned to work on Palworld.

In any case, the point is that Pocketpair had clearly grown to a mid-sized studio with at least two teams. Palworld's team, likely funded by Craftopia profits as mentioned above, ended up becoming a lot larger than Craftopia's team. Meanwhile, the latter development team appears to have had little to no growth at least within that time period.
  • There is evidence that Craftopia may have been used as a testing ground for work on Palworld.
    • Craftopia originally used to be an island hopping game similar to games such as Necesse, but it was changed into a seamless open world game about half a year before Palworld's release.
    • Craftopia has had a monster-catching system using a Poké Ball-like device since its initial Early Access release. It's also possible to capture nearly any creature, including humans and boss monsters, just like in Palworld (there are even achievements for this).
    • Craftopia's progress is also heavily tied to reaching and activating towers. At least one needs to be activated for Age Advancement, which unlocks higher tier crafting recipes. Activating other towers can help the player find Age Advancement materials.
      • In Palworld, defeating the tower's bosses awards a lot of ancient technology points that are used for unlocking useful crafting recipes like the Egg Incubator. 
    • Both games are definitively open world survival craft games with a fair amount of base management automation.
A tower being fully activated in Craftopia.

A monster capture device that looks suspiciously similar to a certain one from a popular game series despite the diamond shape...
 
The most important point to consider here is the first one where Craftopia was fundamentally changed from having smaller island maps to a larger open world map. While the development team may have been planning to do this from the start, the fact is that the Seamless Update was announced shortly after the first Palworld trailer. The update itself was then dropped about 6 months before Palworld entered Early Access, which is also suspicious.
 
Other similarities, which I couldn't fully list, add to the suspicion. Specifically, it raises the question of why Pocketpair opted to work on two open world survival craft games with similar monster capturing features and so on. The mystery deepens when considering that Pocketpair's other games consist of a 2D roguelike deckbuilder and a simple matchmaking-based party game.
 
To be fair, Craftopia and Palworld do have some differences. For example, Craftopia has a skill system and focuses more on personal power. The automation features are also quite different, with Craftopia's being more static like in Factorio or Minecraft while Palworld's relies on using Pals with the right work traits.
 
However, I personally do think that Craftopia was at least partially treated as a testbed for features, mechanics, level design, and so on to further the development of Palworld. I would even go as far as to say I believe Palworld developers may have at least observed and assisted the development of Craftopia to gain experience with working on Palworld. This may actually sound like a good thing if it weren't for the other evidence, including the following...
  • While Craftopia does receive updates, the game is still in the alpha stage based on developer announcements despite the game being in Early Access for nearly 6 years.
    • Major content updates happened more frequently prior to the first Palworld trailer, with updates happening about every 1-2 months aside from an initial surge shortly after the Early Access release.  
    • The cadence of major content updates after the first Palworld trailer, but before the Seamless Update itself was roughly every 3-6 months with a long delay to account for the Seamless Update itself. However, the developers were a bit more active with their announcements.
    • Major content updates after the Seamless Update also happened roughly once every 3-6 months.
    • However, some major content updates within this period consisted of adding pre-Seamless content back into the game.
      • For example, the 2024 Spring Update added Age of Scientific Research crafting recipes, but some of this content was already implemented as far back as 2021.
    • Over the entirety of the game's development, there have been many bug fix updates and similar minor updates. but many are very small to the point that they only fix a handful of issues.
    • As of the posting of this article, there are still a fair amount of skills and items that are WIP or unimplemented.
    • There are also significant performance issues and glitches that wouldn't be acceptable in a fully released game. See below for some examples.
    • There have also been no updates or news announcements at all within the last several months. This is the most recent update, which literally only fixed one minor issue.
My character is climbing "thin air" because the top of the tower appears to have an invisible cubic surface.

Framerate when using the Furniture Workbench (it actually constantly jumps from ~30-40). The framerate hovers around 50 FPS when using some other work stations. Normal gameplay struggles to maintain 60 FPS on High settings. Hardware used: CPU - AMD Ryzen 7 7700X, GPU - Nvidia Geforce RTX 3070, RAM - 32 GB DDR5-6000. This is significantly higher than the recommended specs.

An unimplemented skill with a very familiar tooltip. There aren't as many of these as before, but they still exist. At the time of this writing, there are also many items tagged as WIP.
 
Some who are critical of Pocketpair would argue that Craftopia's development has been abandoned, including some recent reviews. While I wouldn't go as far as to say the development on this game has been abandoned, I can understand why people think so because I do think development progress on the game has been too sluggish. I also think that it's weirdly coincidental that the major updates slowed down after the first Palworld trailer dropped in mid-2021. It's also a shame that the major update frequency (and arguably quality) didn't increase after Palworld's initial windfall even though the recent Seamless Update meant there was a lot to implement.
 
Updates seem to have stalled even further after the Ruins of the End, which seems to be the game's final "story" dungeon, was added about a year ago. The only major update since then seems to have added the island that existed in the first Early Access build back to the game, along with a new content recycling dungeon, skills, and items. It is possible that a beta build is coming soon, but Craftopia clearly needs a lot of work before it's suitable for full release.

While Craftopia does receive occasionally significant updates along with numerous bug fix updates and isn't strictly abandoned, I consider the game's development to be neglected because I think it's not as actively developed as it should. This game isn't the only one that has suffered from prolonged Early Access stagnation. However, there was clearly enthusiasm for developing this game within the first 9 months, yet the magic seemed to fade away even though Pocketpair had the means to better fund the game's development and otherwise ensure a speedier, higher quality full release as the years went by.
Even to this day, Pocketpair claims that they are an indie studio, even though based on employee count, they are more likely to be classified as a AA studio as of 2021 at the earliest and a AAA studio nowadays.
This is literally from Pocketpair's website as of mid-2026 around when this article was written. It might even still be that way on the unarchived version.
 
While Pocketpair almost certainly was an indie developer up until they developed Craftopia for its Early Access release, the previous facts I presented suggest that they haven't been indie since 2021 at the earliest. This is because by this point they had millions of US dollars to work with and were able to hire up to 45 people to work on a second game. Since the Seamless Update was announced shortly after Palworld's first trailer released, that also meant the studio was working on two large open world survival craft games simultaneously, which doesn't exactly seem like indie developer material. 
 
I personally believe that indie studios are generally lucky to have more than a single digit numbers of employees and thousands of dollars to budget. They also usually aren't working on more than one game at a time outside of messing with prototypes or side projects. Meanwhile, Pocketpair during the time they developed Palworld was comparable to studios such as Falcom (65 employees as of 2024) or PUBG Studios when they were working on PUBG (they had up to 70 employees).

I believe Pocketpair is still calling themselves indie in 2026 because they are abusing the "indie dev" label to generate positive sentiment and sympathy while also shielding themselves against criticism. It's not hard to see why given there does seem to be a strongly positive sentiment towards indie games (which I partially contribute to, though not often on this blog) or games erroneously perceived as indie. This muddying of the waters is disturbingly similar to other deceptive behavior, such as how Youtube channel CinemaSins avoided criticism by claiming their content is satire.
 
In any case, Pocketpair is definitely being deceptive by continuing to claim they are indie developers. This may be great for their reputation for now, but because they haven't been indie for several or more years by any reasonable metric, it leads me to wonder what else this company could be lying about.
  • Since Palworld's initial Early Access release, Pocketpair has enjoyed a significant amount of positive support from its fans based on reviews, news announcement comments, and discussion on various forums.
  • However, pointing out the ongoing development state of Craftopia can lead to hostile or rude responses like these from Palworld fans. Other dissenting points can lead to toxic responses as well.
Finally, I want to talk about the last factor contributing to Pocketpair's uniquely questionable game developer practices: their fans. While I find Palworld's success surprising when it comes to how far that success spread given it's now sold over 40 million copies at this point, I can at least think of a few contributing factors to its success. For example, I think that Palworld, even in its initial Early Access iteration, was a superior version of both ARK and the newest Pokemon games (at the time) in a number of ways.
 
In any case, people clearly love Palworld and love Pocketpair (mostly because of Palworld). This in itself is not a problem and I'm not trying to say the entire fandom is bad, but some of the comments that get made by fans are problematic. For instance, the highly egregious examples I linked above, while fairly uncommon, clearly shows that people were rudely shut down when they pointed out issues related to Pocketpair. While there is plenty of more reasonable discussion to find on Palworld forums and the like, it's also easy enough to find more instances of various types of problematic comments such as those filled with fanaticism. Feel free to peruse through the many links to Pocketpair-related discussion throughout the article if you wish to confirm this further.
 
To be fair, none of this behavior is particularly unique to the vocal elements of Pocketpair fandom, but I would argue that it makes the situation surrounding the company more unique. For example, the constant encouragement may have made Pocketpair more likely to continue to neglect Craftopia, which provides a contributing reason as to why that game's development didn't improve even after Palworld's initial success. The continuous fan support and presence of toxic defenders of the company also means that the studio is probably not being criticized as much as it should be.
 
My Conclusion Based on the Facts
 
When it comes to reviewing Pocketpair's portfolio of games they've developed, Palworld is definitely a shining success. However, that success is built on a shaky foundation of neglected and outright abandoned games. Overdungeon took several years to receive fix updates by Pocketpair's own admittance, though they tried to shift blame onto the game's publisher. Their excuse seems to ring more hollow when considering that AI: Art Imposter was rapidly abandoned despite being in Early Access and otherwise clearly unfinished based on the reviews.
 
The situation surrounding Craftopia's development is a lot more nuanced. The game sold hundreds of thousands of copies within a few months of its Early Access release. However, while the development was active early on, it started slowing down around when the first Palworld trailer dropped. Craftopia's focus then shifted drastically towards a seamless open world that may or may not have been planned from the start, but also made it even more similar to Palworld due to some existing similarities such as a monster capturing system using a capsule-like device.
 
After a few more content updates that took 3-6 months each, Craftopia received its Seamless Update in the middle of 2023, but Palworld's subsequent Early Access debut made it apparent that the latter game received significantly more developer attention. This is supported by the strong correlation between Craftopia's profits and Palworld's development budget up until 2024 along with the surge of employment at Pocketpair that appeared to have no tangible benefits for Craftopia's team. Both of these factors indicate that a substantial amount of the profits were funneled towards the new game's development.
 
While the development progress for both games should've been reversed from the start, Palworld was massively successful, which gave Pocketpair a second chance allocate more development funding and focus towards Craftopia. However, the pace of development remained about the same as before the Seamless Update and now included re-addeding existing content that was removed due to the Seamless Update. Fast forward to the present where Palworld has left Early Access and while Craftopia technically has an endgame, it's still worse off than the more polished initial Early Access version of Palworld.

While there have been some cases of developers intentionally working on another game even though their existing game felt unfinished, like with Night of the Dead by Jackto Studios, I can't find any that "got away with it" to the point that Pocketpair has. Jackto Studios, for example, was criticized quite a bit for rushing their game out of Early Access and working on a new one even though it had fairly solid sales numbers. Meanwhile while there are people who are skeptical of Pocketpair's actions as I showed in a few of the links above, they don't seem numerous considering such critics get shut down by fans and Pocketpair's games aren't exactly getting flooded with tons of negative reviews.
 
So why are Pocketpair's game development practices so uniquely questionable? It is because of the following reasons:
  1. The majority of their game catalogue at the time of this writing consists of abandoned or neglected games. Even if Pocketpair releases more games later, their early history will still consist of game abandonment and neglect. 
  2. One of their games, Craftopia, was very successful because it sold hundreds of thousands of copies, but development on the game actually slowed down. There's also been little to no sign of team growth or significant improvement in update quality. The latter point would've provided an adequate explanation for why updates slowed down.
  3. The evidence suggests that Pocketpair used the profits from an extremely unfinished game in the alpha state of development to work on a new game: Palworld.
  4. Craftopia was changed to become more like the open world survival craft tech progression-focused game that Palworld is, and there are other signs of mechanics and features that first existed in Craftopia that also exist in Palworld. All of these suggest that Craftopia was at least partially used as a testbed for Palworld.
  5. Since Craftopia is still far from finished, more than 500,000 customers are basically being double charged if they want to play a more finished, albeit somewhat different, version of the game they originally supported. In other words, this is not a typical case of early backers of a game project getting screwed over because the studio developed another, similar game and was clearly capable of finishing Craftopia in a satisfactory manner.
  6. The company still claims to be an indie developer even though they have long since outgrown that classification as a game studio. 
  7. Despite the above issues, the company enjoys a substantial amount of fan support to the point some critique against them gets shut down by said fans. This may affect the continued direction of their game development focus because the positivity may justify their actions, especially when paired with the likelihood they are receiving insufficient criticism where it matters.
No other studio that I'm aware of comes remotely close to being like Pocketpair when it comes to the problematic reasons I listed above. It could be argued that other studios have some of these problems in a similar sense (for example, plenty of studios have massive fan support and a few may have pretended to be indie when they're not). However, if I had to think of studios that used profits from an extremely unfinished game to develop another similar game, finished that other similar game before the former game, has a catalogue that is primarily composed of abandoned or neglected games, erroneously continues to claim to be an indie developer, and has tons of fan support, only Pocketpair comes to mind.
 
Now that the facts have been established, the more important issue is that these practices earned them what I consider significant ill-gotten success. This could, as I mentioned in the introduction, have an adverse impact on the gaming industry as I will explain below.
 
Addressing Possible Counterpoints

Before I explain the negative impacts of Pocketpair's game development practices though, there is one other thing that needs to be addressed.
 
Given how I brought up that Pocketpair has a huge fandom supporting them and how some of them seem to react to dissent against the company, it's not surprising that there are many rebuttals with various counterarguments or counterpoints when even a handful of the facts presented above are mentioned. I also personally encountered some and can see others being made, assuming they haven't been made already. Because of these reasons, I want to first address the (potential) arguments made by these fans. This should provide a deeper insight into the behavior of the more outspoken parts of the fandom as well a deeper insight into my views on Pocketpair, their game development practices, and more.
 
Feel free to point out if I missed any other good counterarguments or counterpoints though, particularly to the statements I made in the previous section. Please be civil about it though.
 
 
This is the argument I see the most and while it's true, the quality difference between Craftopia and even the initial Early Access version of Palworld, which are similar games by the same developer, is not favorable for Craftopia in my opinion. The former game is still in alpha while the initial Early Access version of Palworld was more like an early beta version. While Craftopia did undergo a huge rework during its development that may or may not have been planned, the game should theoretically be in a better state than Palworld due to its longer development cycle. In reality, Palworld consistently seems to be in a much better state.
 
Again, the reality is Craftopia is still in an alpha state after nearly 6 years by the developer's own admission. The "frequent updates" clearly aren't doing enough to progress the game to the later stages of development in a timely manner since most of them are small bug fixes with only very occasional major content and feature updates. Even if a miraculous update that massively improves the game drops soon, which is possible given the upcoming anniversary, the game would still have been in development too long considering it took roughly 5 years for Palworld to go from a trailer to a fully released game. Craftopia has passed 6 years in this case because the initial trailer for the game was posted on June 2020.

"Palworld is in a better state because it's on Unreal Engine instead of Unity - here's an interview proving that"

While Mizobe is right that Unreal Engine does appear to be quite good for developing 3D open world games such as Palworld, Unity isn't terrible by any means for developing 3D games. For example, Hoyoverse's big 3 games (Genshin Impact, Honkai Star Rail, and Zenless Zone Zero) are all huge 3D games developed using Unity and two of them are open world. A number of notable, highly successful large-scale 3D games have also been developed by smaller studios, such as the following:
In other words, it's reasonable to use the game engine more suited for your needs as Mizobe said, but Unreal Engine isn't some sort of special wizardry that Unity is not. Other 3D open world games have been developed to full release in Unity to significant success, which makes it unlikely that Unity is the root of the problems behind Craftopia's development issues.

"It's normal to reinvest profits into another game." 
This is a snippet of a larger post full of counterpoints. It's one of the better rebuttals I've gotten when discussing Pocketpair.

The typical expectation for Early Access games, in my opinion, is that the revenue should primarily (but not necessarily exclusively) be used to fund further development of the game being sold. There are others who seem to more or less echo this notion. While Craftopia is not a blatant Early Access or Kickstarter scam, the evidence strongly suggests that the aforementioned expectation has not and is not being met even though Pocketpair is clearly capable of meeting it. It also strongly suggests this failure is intentional.
 
Reinvesting into the development of another game is more reasonable as a game reaches or achieves full release. Developing other games using profits from a finished game seems like the normal, established practice to me and I doubt many others would disagree with that.

"So what if Craftopia isn't finished? Focusing the profits on developing Palworld instead was and is a good strategy."

I had someone argue this point when having a candid discussion about Palworld and Pocketpair in real life. However, this argument assumes that Palworld was guaranteed to be highly successful. Variations of this argument also presume that Craftopia was doomed to fail. These are a form of hindsight bias.
 
Even if one assumes that Pocketpair somehow had a foolproof plan for Palworld's success, I still think that Pocketpair's game development priorities were and are a bad strategy for the following reasons:
  • Pocketpair didn't need to fully reinvest profits into developing Craftopia. They just needed to reinvest a fair amount so that the team could grow, have access to better Unity-related tools when it mattered the most, and so on.
  • There's no sign that Craftopia will receive a proper full release soon, even though it's been about 2.5 years after their initial Palworld windfall (also, I doubt they needed to reinvest all that profit into finishing Palworld). 
    • This point also addresses any arguments pointing out Pocketpair could use Palworld money to fund Craftopia development, because there are basically no signs that happened or will happen in a significant way.
  • If enough people find out what Pocketpair did, it could lead to more significant outrage later on even if that's not the case right now. This has happened with other studios like Jackto Studio, which I mentioned above. 
"Pocketpair is an indie dev, so this practice makes more sense/is fine to do." 

First of all, I personally think indie studios should generally be held same standards as other game devs, particularly when it comes to utilizing consumer-friendly practices. The reality is there are many bad indie games in the form of shovelware that are easy to find by browsing titles under $10 or using the Discovery Queue on Steam. Holding all developers to the same high standards will help ensure more quality titles, indie or otherwise, are released.
 
With that said, as I mentioned in the above section, there are some good reasons to believe Pocketpair was not indie studio by the time Palworld started being developed.
  • Pocketpair had over 50 employees when Palworld was released into Early Access, with a dedicated team of around 45.
  • Pocketpair had been handling millions of dollars for years due to Craftopia's profits.
  • Pocketpair was working on at least two large-scale projects simultaneously from 2021-2026.
In other words, Pocketpair is not an indie developer and hasn't been for many years.

 "Craftopia won't magically get better by throwing money at it."

While there may be an upper limit to benefits from funding a game development project, I disagree with such a counterpoint in this context. There are things Pocketpair could've done with their money at any point after Craftopia's initial success that could improve the game's development, such as:
  • Hiring more developers who know how to use Unity.
    • After Palworld's initial success, poaching developers from companies like Hoyoverse may have been plausible too.
    • Craftopia, as a 3D open world game, is a huge project, so it would benefit from having more manpower than the ~10 members on the team it has had for at least 3-4 years.
  • Hiring newer developers and training them on how to use Unity. 
  • Paying for licenses to use various useful Unity tools if they haven't already.
  • Producing or outsourcing the production of newer, better, and/or more unique assets.
  • And more...
Had these investments been made back in 2020 or 2021, the impacts would've been significant. However, even in 2024, the impact of increased investment into Craftopia's development should've been noticeable by this point because about 2.5 years have passed. Instead the pace of development didn't improve and arguably regressed, leading to a game that remains very rough around the edges in a lot of ways.
 
"X game was in early access for a really long time too."

First of all, I'd argue that if any game is stuck in Early Access for too long, that should be considered problematic. For example, on other platforms I have criticized other games such as Secrets of Grindea, a game I otherwise really like, because it spent 13 years in development and over 9.5 years in Early Access (in this case, the critique was light-hearted due to Pixel Ferret's development situation).
 
With that said, the issue with Craftopia being stuck in Early Access has important context to consider. Craftopia was clearly a great financial success, but evidence suggests most of the profits went into developing Palworld. While Craftopia has undergone some major changes from its original iteration, the game seems more like a testbed for Palworld instead of its own game. For example, as I mentioned above, Craftopia got a seamless open world update that made it more like Palworld prior to Palworld's release into Early Access. There is also minimal evidence that Craftopia's rate or quality of development improved after Palworld's initial success in Early Access.
 
"This other game in Early Access is worse!" 
 
I don't doubt that. Early Access has plenty of awful games. Some are blatant shovelware too. However, such games rarely see significant financial success, especially to the degree that Craftopia has, before they are abandoned or neglected. In addition, once again, evidence suggests Craftopia's development was intentionally stunted to focus on the development of Palworld. 
 
I'd also argue Pocketpair's game development practices are worse in a way. This is because their practices have not been heavily condemned, leading to more long-term consequences such as Craftopia not being released after nearly 6 years even though Pocketpair has clearly been capable of accomplishing this.

Also, while I could provide sources to back up my claims that such other games exist here, I don't want to link examples of awful Early Access games because they don't deserve the traffic. Depending on your preferences, you should be able to find plenty of them in the Discovery Queue though.
 
"What about this other practice/company? It is/They are so much worse!"
 
While I personally think people make certain gaming industry practices and companies out to be much worse than they really are, it is true that there are many worse practices and companies out there. When it comes to hated practices, I have weighed in on them very occasionally. 
 
As for companies, many of my articles involve criticizing and discussing specific developers. However, I focus more on the game development process especially when it comes to game design. This means my articles may discuss a company's bad marketing ideas, but they are less likely to cover other serious problems such as severe employee mistreatment. Also, before someone starts throwing around baseless accusations about how I don't care about gaming industry employees or the like, I definitely do and I discuss the issues through other channels (like my stream or through Discord) where I am quite outspoken about the economical, social, and political context of these problems and more. In any case, this article is about me criticizing Pocketpair for how they handle their game development, which is consistent with this blog's purpose.
 
Finally, companies widely perceived as awful such as Nintendo, Blizzard, EA, and so on are also widely condemned, meaning many other media outlets and people thoroughly critique them with only a bit of pushback at most. This also generally applies to the many gaming industry practices that are perceived as terrible. While this doesn't stop me from occasionally writing articles about these widely discussed topics, I tend to write many articles about niche issues such as the WoW Token's absurd markup. Since Pocketpair doesn't seem to be condemned and in fact appears to be beloved to the point some fans actively defend the company against criticism, an article discussing why they might not be a good game developer qualifies as a niche article.
 
"You like Nintendo/You're a Nintendo fanboy"
 
Given how much anti-Nintendo sentiment there is in the various Palworld news announcement threads, this is one of the counterpoint I foresee being brought up the most.
 
However, the fact is I've been critical of Nintendo's practices for a long time, particularly when it comes to the overzealous protection of their intellectual property. Given my blog has mostly focused on western games, I never really posted these opinions here, so here they are:
On a related note, I haven't spent money on Nintendo products for years at this point, nor do I have much of a desire to. I also haven't played a mainline Pokemon game for over a decade (though I do watch videos, which is how I know about Pokemon Scarlet and Violet glitches).
 
In other words, I have plenty of reasons to dislike Nintendo. The fact that I am critical of Pocketpair doesn't change that. If anything, Pocketpair's questionable practices remind me of how bad AAA companies in the industry are and how much worse they could potentially be.

Possible Impacts of Pocketpair's Practices
 
Now that I've explained why I believe Pocketpair's game development practices are uniquely questionable, one may wonder why I even care. Why would I spend so long drafting and writing an article about a single company I barely talked about before? This section will explain why I think their actions could be a problem.
 
The most straightforward impact is that other developers may feel emboldened when they learn how Pocketpair became successful and try to do something similar. They may, for example, release a promising-looking game into Early Access that's looks like it's being very actively developed like Craftopia was. They could then quietly pull a bait-and-switch and focus the profits towards the development of another game while leaving a skeleton crew to work on the previous game to abate the outrage of their existing fans. Most notably, this hypothetical developer could then repeat this process multiple times similar to how Pocketpair did until they release a massive hit or otherwise make enough money.
 
I'm also concerned that larger studios, particularly AAA studios, may feel they can get away with pushing even more unfinished releases out the door. The games may also be released in a more unfinished state as the concept of what a minimum viable product is changes. After all, if Pocketpair can get away with selling games that are still in the alpha state and using those profits to make another game, why not also fully release games in a similar state to generate profit and fix the game way later, if at all?
 
Finally, Pocketpair is also a publisher now, and while some games they're publishing seem quite promising, they may be sympathetic to companies that try to become successful in the way I just described. Other publishers may also follow their lead or demand that developers try to mimic Pocketpair's success in a literal manner, which would exacerbate the issue I described in the previous paragraph.

The broad issue of studios of all sizes potentially following Pocketpair's lead, which I really hope I'm wrong about, is not an easy fix. Improving consumer awareness to these kinds of schemes is one of the best ways to combat it and is part of why I wrote this article in the first place because the adoption of questionable, yet profitable practices goes well beyond a single company like Pocketpair. However, Valve could at least do more to discourage abusing Early Access in various ways that include generate funding for another game through deceptive means by implementing the following:
  • If an Early Access game is being sold for money and is not released within 3 years, all players who bought that game during the Early Access period can refund it. Time played does not matter.
    • For games that are already in Early Access, the deadline to fully release the game would instead be 3 years after these rules are implemented.
    • The actual timeframe could be different from what I suggest here, but the general idea is I don't want games to linger in Early Access.
    • I am aware that the developer and/or publisher can just rush a game out of Early Access sooner, but that'll probably lead to a ton of new buyers refunding an unfinished mess of a game and hurt the reputation of the company or companies involved.
  • The above does not apply if the developers allow players to test their Early Access game for free by allowing them to play the current build of the game as a demo. This must be available from the moment the game enters Early Access and cannot be added afterward to pause the 3-year deadline.
    • Players can choose to buy the game to support the project like before, but now they can try before they buy.
    • This would allow developers to run a public alpha/beta test while still receiving some financial support. They can make the access exclusive later on if they believe it would help secure more funding.
    • For games that are already in Early Access, they can pause the 3-year deadline by providing a qualifying demo before the rules are implemented. 
    • It's fine to make unstable versions exclusive to those who buy the game. 
  • To prevent abuse of the updated refund system, the buyer can only do this with one Early Access game per year, after which they are subject to the usual refund restrictions.
  • The developer and/or publisher must pay back their share of all refunds in a timely manner. They are not allowed to list new games on Steam until they do.
    • To prevent people from simply forming a new company to get around this, all people involved with the offending entities are blacklisted.
    • The developer, publisher, or affected individuals can file an appeal if they believe the refunds are illegitimate (a huge streamer may try to encourage mass refunding of an Early Access game they don't like for example) or otherwise believe they shouldn't be blacklisted.
    • The developer already has to pay back refunded games on Steam, so this is close to normal practice.
  • The developer must disclose simple financial information to show where Early Access profits are going. This must be verifiable.
    • It doesn't have to be as complicated as what's described in this thread, but the OP here provides a good framework for how it could work. 
Basically, I want Early Access to be more consumer-friendly and discourage developers from prematurely or wantonly listing their game on Steam. While these measures might seem extreme, I also think that allowing consumers to try and buy Early Access games with confidence through the above protections will give capable developers the confidence to seek even more funding and feedback than before.
 
If the above cannot be fully implemented, I would at least like to see some fiscal transparency when it comes to where an Early Access game's profits are going.
 
A Series of Closing Thoughts

Now that I've highlighted how and why I think Pocketpair's game development practices are so uniquely questionable and explained why it could be a problem on a broad scale, I want to close out this article by directly addressing the two entities I find the most problematic when it comes to this issue: Pocketpair itself and the company's fans, particularly the more zealous ones.

Addressing Pocketpair Directly

I would like to think you didn't act out of malice or greed when, based on the evidence, your leadership came up with the strategy to focus on Palworld above an already successful Early Access game. Maybe you just reasoned that the shift in focus was the better idea or had some sort of other good reason. I would also like to think the situations with Overdungeon and AI Art Imposter were just horrible mistakes as well. However, you still screwed over many customers, especially when it comes to Craftopia.
 
First and foremost, if what my article alleges is even remotely true, please post an acknowledgement of your past deeds along with a formal apology on as many platforms as possible. To add substance to this apology, I think you should give every person who bought Craftopia up until 2024 a free copy of Palworld (if the buyer already owns Palworld, they receive a gift copy instead). I thought you should do this right when Palworld initially released into Early Access and I still think this is the best immediate course of action you can take to make things right with some of your most veteran customers. All the evidence suggests that everyone who bought Craftopia early on was basically investing in the development of Palworld, which ended up very similar to Craftopia, so why not give them a more complete version of what they bought to begin with?
 
Second, I want you to finish developing Craftopia properly. Regardless of whether you follow the previous step to make things right with early buyers of Craftopia, you absolutely should take the time to work meticulously and make Craftopia into the awesome game it could be. This also must be communicated clearly through frequent news announcements like during the early stages of Craftopia's development. With that said, Given the timeframe of Palworld's development, I would ask that Craftopia see a proper, quality full release before 2030.
 
The third thing I want you to do is promise that you will take a stand against the same questionable practices you seem to have used. If a developer seeks you as a publisher but has a history of neglecting and abandoning past games, they should be rejected for that reason.
 
Also, stop pretending to be an indie company. You haven't been one by any reasonable metric for several years. 
 
To be honest, even if you did all of these things, I would probably not feel inclined to buy your games for a while. However, I can at least tell other people you tried to redeem yourself in the eyes of the consumers.
 
Finally, if I got anything wrong, especially if there's any information that can definitively exonerate you of the allegations I made in this article, please post that information in response to this article as a comment. Depending on what is posted in response, I may write a follow-up article.
 
Addressing the Fandom

I want to thank all of you who had the patience to read this far. I doubt it was easy to sift through all the evidence and statements about how Pocketpair might not be as good of a developer as you thought, but you persevered to the end of this article. Unfortunately, now I need to get a bit harsh.

First of all, since I never outright stated this, I don't think Palworld or Craftopia are bad games and can't speak for Overdungeon or AI: Art Imposter. I do, however, think Pocketpair can do a lot better especially because they already have a history of developing their games in what appears to be a questionable manner even though they're a relatively new studio. If you enjoy the games this company makes, don't let my article stop you from continuing to enjoy what you already bought. You probably can't refund the game(s) anyway.
 
For those of you who just happened to notice how popular Palworld was or otherwise were casually interested in Pocketpair's games, but didn't engage too deeply with the fandom, I have no issue with you. However, I would urge you to reconsider spending more money on anything from Pocketpair for now.
 
As for those who engaged more deeply with the fandom, please rethink the company you're throwing so much support behind. Based on what is presented above, there's plenty of reason to believe they're not a good company at all, much less some mythical force for good in the gaming industry. Remember that companies like Nintendo became as complacent and arrogant as they did partially because they had numerous enablers and defenders. Pocketpair appears to now have the same problem because of some people within your fandom.
 
This situation can change for the better though, but only by acting as a collective as you constructively criticize the company's actions and encourage course correction. For example, what I suggested above on how Pocketpair could make things right with their more veteran supporters. I'm also sure that you highly engaged fans can find more to criticize than I did especially based on some of the discussion I've been reading about Palworld 1.0.
 
Finally, for those who act in a toxic manner like in the various posts I highlighted in this article, harassed people for giving Palworld a bad review, and so on, you represent a type of fanatical fan I dislike. I have had the displeasure of dealing with similar people from various fandoms throughout the years who would also actively bury criticism and otherwise act hostile to even the slightest bit of dissent. You should know that your actions most likely contributed significantly in terms of encouraging Pocketpair to continue to act the way they did. That's why I'd ask that you please think twice before lavishing excessive praise or posting a hostile reply to a supposed "hater" or "shill". Ultimately, people like you make the entire fandom look bad.
 
Final Actual Closing Thoughts
 
While this article turned out to be quite long, it's hardly some masterful exposé (in fact, this article will almost certainly have some mistakes despite the extensive proofreading). All the evidence is publicly available and the conclusion I personally drew from that evidence, which is hardly original by any means, is that Pocketpair has a history of not properly finishing their games before moving on to the next one and they aren't being criticized enough for it. 
 
What I found most objectionable about this practice is that the profits from these sometimes extremely unfinished games seemed to be used to fuel the development of the next one, even if the previous game was quite successful. Such a practice is a significant departure from the normal expected practice of using profits from actually finished games to work on new games and is also quite different from the AAA practice of sometimes pushing beta test-like games to full release. Even though I am personally a patient gamer, I do not want to see such a practice become more popular or worsened by blatant malice. I also don't like how comfortable some of Pocketpair's fans seem to be with their company being accused of employing such a practice, because it means there are people who are okay with it happening at all.
 
I hope organizing all this information into this article shows that Pocketpair is doing some uniquely questionable things in game development that need to be addressed. Optimistically, this could simply involve them rebutting all the evidence and allegations by providing a solid explanation for all of their implicit actions.
 
With all that said, I'm also not in the interest of starting more drama than necessary. Do not harass Pocketpair's employees for this and do not engage in hate bandwagoning either. As I mentioned above, I think it is better to offer constructive criticism instead so they can become a better company.
 
...I hope I don't get harassed for this article either.
Posted by at 2:07 PM
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