Palworld absolutely blew up when it was released back in 2024. The ‘Pokemon with guns’ (a branding the devs have tried to escape from) game was so successful that the game’s developer, Pocketpair, has launched its own publishing branch. The announcement of this new publisher clearly made an impact, as it had received 150 pitches within one week of its announcement. However, Palworld’s communications director and publishing manager, John ‘Bucky’ Buckley, revealed that the studio had received pitches way earlier than that.
Speaking to GamesRadar+ at GDC 2025, Buckley told us, “No one has money at the moment. Minutes, that’s not even a joke; minutes after Palworld released and that started to happen, people were sending us pitches even though we weren’t a publisher.” He added, “I think there was just this desperate, you know, ‘we need money’ that’s going on right now, and a lot of people contacted us.” While an indie studio seeking funding (like Surgent Studios, who is the first developer releasing a game under Pocketpair) isn’t surprising, Buckley says it wasn’t just small teams reaching out. “To our surprise, it wasn’t just little two-man teams or something. Some really big names contacted us, you know, AAA, AA, premium indies, all these contacts.”
Despite the studio not having a publishing arm at the time, Pocketpair was still receptive to the developers pitching to them: “we started meeting these people very early last year, listening to ideas. And we were very honest. We said, hey, we’re not publishers or anything, but we’ll listen. And we talked about it a lot internally. What can we do? What can we not do?” which eventually led to the formation of Pocketpair Publishing. Buckley said, “We want to help cool indies get made. We want to help cool, premium indie, kind of AAs get made.”
Buckley also mentioned that Pocketpair Publishing doesn’t really have a niche yet, saying, “we’re open to anything pitch-wise at the moment.” Although he did mention that “A few of the very basic no-nos are, you know, no gambling games, anything that’s heavy on crypto or stuff we’re obviously not touching. As far as genres go, we’re very open. Platforms, we’re very open.” adding, “we’re kind of open to helping people with their weird little ideas because they have them.”
