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.

Reviewing the Announcement

 

The announcement starts by acknowledging that Palworld would not exist without Craftopia and stating their goal of releasing Craftopia into 1.0 by 2027. It then explains the game's development history, such as by stating it was a dream game started by a small team, but also pointing out faults such as a lack of communication as the years went by. Pocketpair then states that the 1.0 version of Craftopia will focus on refining and polishing the existing content, though there will be some new content as well. They then mention that there will be an update for Xbox players and thank people for their support.

 

While this announcement sounds good on the surface and, to their credit, admits some fault and acknowledges Craftopia's impact on Pocketpair's growth and Palworld's development, it starts to make less sense when scrutinized.

 

To start, there are problems with how they acknowledge their history and faults. For example, it is disingenuous for Pocketpair to claim they were only giving the impression that Craftopia was receiving less attention. This is because, in my opinion, Palworld has consistently been a higher quality game than Craftopia, despite the fact Craftopia has spent 6+ years in development while Palworld took 5 years to go from an idea to a fully released game. Pocketpair also doesn't really go into too much detail on how much Palworld's development was supported by Craftopia's existence and success. This suggests that they lack a rebuttal for the allegation that Palworld's development was fueled heavily by Craftopia's profits and Craftopia's development arguably suffered as a result, which also further explains the lack of details.

 

When it comes to Craftopia's future itself, a 2027 release leaves at most a little over a year to polish and refine Craftopia. However, as I showed in my last article, the game still has a fair amount of bugs, performance issues, and unimplemented content and features.

 

In addition, while the game technically has an "end" in the form of Ruins of the End and an endgame zone, it really needs more of a focus on content than the announcement implies. For example, there's a general lack of an ongoing plot despite the game opening with some surprisingly heavy plot. The seamless open world also suffers from feeling empty even by open world game standards. This is because areas, particularly later ones, are just generally lacking in things that would make the world more lively such as enemies, points of interest, interactable objects, and so on. It doesn't help that some assets look plain and grossly outdated either, which makes it harder to simply enjoy the view in Craftopia too. Below are some examples of what Craftopia looks like right now (with High Quality Textures, maximum Render Distance, and middling LOD):

This is a settlement from the second area. Despite how vibrant the area is, it barely has anyone in it.

I understand that in this story, the world was destroyed and we're working on remaking it, but this endgame tower settlement (usually the main hub of the zone) is still pathetic compared to a lot of the other ones.

An open area of the second-to-last zone. The low draw distance (which needs to also be fixed) isn't helping, but it's mostly just a few enemies and scattered flora. Basically no points of interest at all. I later flew over huge portions of the area and found only a few points of interest.

By the way, did you know you can move during the opening cinematic and this character is surrounded by an invisible, climbable cube? It's funny, but also definitely yet another thing among many things that needs to be fixed for 1.0.

 

Because of the points made in the last two paragraphs, a 2027 release window seems unrealistic for any serious attempt at polishing and refining the game even with an amazing dev team, especially since it would likely involve implementing a significant amount of additional (overworld) content. While I made some suggestions on what Pocketpair should do, it seems more likely that their idea of polishing and refining the game is going to be less extensive than what I think the game deserves.

As I also explain in my response, the announcement seems like reactive damage control for the sake of optics because Craftopia has been getting more negative reviews lately and there's also been a lot of doom and gloom about how the game has been abandoned on the Steam forum. This sentiment is not surprising since as I explained in my last article, development progress for Craftopia slowed down from major updates every 1-2 months to major updates every 3-6 months to no major updates since December last year (~9 months and counting). There were also no minor updates for about 4-5 months recently as well.

A graph of Craftopia's review history. Notice how in July there was a particularly high proportion of negative reviews.

Between the short time until Craftopia's potential release and how the announcement itself seems like a response to the negativity surrounding the game, it's no surprise that others are also skeptical of Pocketpair's statements. For example, some in the announcement thread along with the 6th Anniversary Update thread have accused Pocketpair of simply making a PR statement and/or are trying to rush Craftopia to full release to suppress the increasing negativity against the company.

The 6th Anniversary Update

Speaking of the 6th Anniversary Update, it's even harder to take Pocketpair's announcement seriously when taking that into consideration. It was announced in late August as an alpha-unstable update and fully released as the 6th Anniversary Update shortly after they announced their Craftopia 1.0 release plan. Considering Pocketpair stated their intent to improve the game through polishing and refinement for 1.0, let's see what the accompanying update does to help accomplish that by reviewing the patch notes in their entirety:

◆ Newly Added Content
- It looks like Anubis has something special for the 6th Anniversary.
- Added new equipment to celebrate the 6th Anniversary:
　・Blue Mono Lantern
　・Green Mono Lantern
　・Red Mono Lantern
　・Yellow Mono Lantern
　・White Mono Lantern
　・Purple Mono Lantern
- Added new furniture to celebrate the 6th Anniversary:
　・Mono Street Light
　・Blue Mono Banner
　・Green Mono Banner
　・Red Mono Banner
　・Yellow Mono Banner
　・White Mono Banner
　・Purple Mono Banner

...While I understand that the anniversary updates aren't usually when major updates drop for Craftopia, even the last two, which were arguably underwhelming in their own right, had significantly more substance than this. It is possible that Pocketpair has some stuff prepared for a major update later, but if they had any improvements and optimizations ready, why not show that there's merit to their Craftopia refinement and polishing plan by implementing them with the 6th Anniversary Update? Instead, the update consisted of a tiny amount of content, which continues the trend of tiny updates for this game that's been happening for the entirety of 2026.

Ultimately, this action, or rather, lack of action suggests that Pocketpair had nothing ready for their announcement, which supports the notion that it was made in a reactive manner. It also significantly supports the idea that the company isn't too serious about improving the game for a 1.0 release. This might be okay for the handful of fans of the game who are fine with how it is now, but I would say Pocketpair needs to do better (and based on the responses, it seems some others agree).

 

Addressing the Counterpoint

 

As I mentioned, this article is meant to serve as an addendum to the Addressing Possible Counterpoints section of my previous article, so this section will be formatted that way.

 

"Pocketpair announced Craftopia is going to get a 1.0 update and fully release!"

 

This is true, but the announcement lacks credibility for several reasons:

• They're simply stating what their plans are and have done nothing to back it up, even though they had an opportunity to do that with the 6th Anniversary Update.
• Their questionable history, which they only vaguely acknowledge for some reason when they have an opportunity to refute potentially damning allegations, is a good reason not to trust their words.
• Given the lack of substance to back up their announcement and the fact that Craftopia's been receiving more negative attention lately, the statement comes off as reactive damage control.
• Finally, the 2027 goal they set seems unrealistic unless their intention is to be lax with the polishing and refining process. Even if the development team does put in an incredible amount of effort, it would've been more reasonable to set a goal later than next year and pushed for a higher quality release instead.

In other words, Pocketpair's announcement may be a good source of hope for some fans, but it's not gospel. In fact, I think the announcement is so untrustworthy that it's appalling how many people simply believe what they said to the point of even flipping their stance in reviews. The reality is that based on the details or lack of details in Pocketpair's announcement regarding Craftopia's future, the full release of this game will most likely be rushed for the sake of superficial optics. This would result in a 1.0 version that's broken and otherwise inferior to other AA open world (survival craft) games, with the most relevant one being Palworld.  

 

Closing Thoughts

At the end of the day, I want to make sure Craftopia ends up releasing as a good game that's worthy of an AA studio. However, Pocketpair's recent announcement along with their absolutely minuscule 6th Anniversary Update give me reason to believe that the release version of this game will be anything but good. It doesn't help that there also hasn't been a major content update for over 9 months either (assuming the Winter Update last December can be considered one, which is arguable). Since the game has already languished in Early Access (6+ years) for longer than it took to develop Palworld from scratch (~5 years), I would actually prefer that Pocketpair take a little more time improving the game, though I still maintain they should at least finish it before 2030.

 

As a reminder, here's what I think Pocketpair should do to properly redeem themselves for their uniquely questionable game development practices:

1. They must (definitively) acknowledge their past faults.
1. They kind of did this in the recent announcement, but I think it's too vague and conveniently ignores certain, damning details.
2. They must give every person who bought Craftopia before 2024 a copy of Palworld.
1. I doubt this will ever happen, even though the company now has hundreds of millions of dollars due to Palworld's success.
3. They must properly finish Craftopia before 2030.
1. I could have provided a better description of what a "proper, quality" release was, so I'll say it here: The release version of Craftopia must meet or exceed the quality of Palworld and otherwise be at least comparable in quality to similar games from other AA studios.
4. They must take a stand against the questionable practices that helped you reach success.
1. However, this needs to be done without looking like a total hypocrite. 
5. They must stop pretending to be an indie company.
1. Some fans are still claiming Pocketpair is an indie studio and Pocketpair's website still claims they are a "top-class indie game development and operation company in Japan" as of this article's writing. 

While Pocketpair would still need to do a lot more to redeem themselves in my eyes, "properly finishing Craftopia" is a huge step towards achieving that redemption. Craftopia was a major success that sold hundreds of thousands of copies early on, which means that the many people who bought it had to watch as most of the profits from the unfinished game they just bought seemed to be used to develop an entirely new game. Craftopia was and is a neglected game, even if Pocketpair insists otherwise, and the skeptical responses to the recent announcement serve as further confirmation of that sentiment.

 

Unfortunately, it really does look like Pocketpair is going to fumble even this chance at redemption by half-assing Craftopia's release based on their recent announcement and game update. If this does happen, they will fail to redeem themselves as a company in a big way even if they try to backtrack by pushing post-release updates and I would like to think they'll get punished for it at some point. At the same time, given how many people defend Pocketpair and accept their words at face value, they might get away with their continued usage of questionable practices (in this case, abusing the Early Access system one last time by rubber stamping an Early Access game with a full release is nothing new so it's not uniquely questionable). This would, as I described in my last article, not be great for the future of gaming and the gaming industry especially since Pocketpair is big enough and popular enough to be considered an "exemplar" of a game development studio.

 

But who knows? Maybe Pocketpair will prove me and others wrong, expand Craftopia's dev team (if it isn't already), and have that team work hard while using the knowledge gained from developing Palworld to make sure Craftopia really is a good, properly finished game in the eyes of more than their superfans or casual onlookers who won't investigate beyond the announcements. It would be nice if they successfully make this first step towards redemption.