After the resounding success of Palworld in terms of sales on PC and Xbox, Takuro Mizobe, CEO of developer studio Pocket Pair, spoke to Note.com about the game, revealing that its development budget was two million Japanese yen, equivalent to 6.75 million US dollars. He said that he personally wasn’t excited about the game and didn’t want to work on it, because he didn’t want to worry about the budget.
“I didn’t feel like the budget was worth the effort it took to raise it.”
“Initially, we didn’t want to build a giant game, and the whole project was supposed to be finished in a year, because we didn’t want to work on the same project for more than a year. In the end, the project was not finished and we released it in an incomplete state.”
“Our company cannot develop major games.” At the same time, there were only 10 employees! I never imagined this!”
“The goal was to work on a project quickly, and release it to test players’ reaction.”
He added that the game was much worse than the current version, and we realized at some point in the development process that we did not have enough money, time, or labor to fully realize our ambition, and at that time I felt that it was useless to finance the game. But the studio eventually chose to borrow the money and continue working on the game, hiring new developers, and during 3 years of work, 40 people were hired to complete the project with the help of external employees.
