The explosive success of Palworld earlier this year brought a lot of money to developer Pocketpair, but the company's CEO wants to make indie-scale games rather than games that are "beyond AAA."

According to GameSpark's interview with CEO Takuro Mizobe (translated by Google Translate and DeepL), Palworld was developed using money earned from Pocketpair's two previous games, Craftopia and Overdungeon. And it paid off: Palworld's fusion of the survival and Pokémon genres was a success, earning "tens of billions of yen," or about $70 million, enough to make a AAA-sized game. Mizobe, however, stated that the Pocket Pair "structure" is not suited for such a large scale, and that he is more interested in smaller games

, and that the "Pokémon" genre is "a very good example of the kind of game that can be made in a small space.

Mizobe said that he is "not interested" in making games that would require a huge budget. I want to pursue what I think is interesting as an indie game."

Last month, John "Bucky" Buckley, community manager at Palworld, urged people to "spend as much money on indies as possible" in an interview on the YouTube channel Going Indie. Buckley as well as Mizobe seem to want the indie sector to flourish, as well as the AAA Live Service games that are released annually; Palworld has received several updates since its Early Access release, but Pocket Pair has not promised to continue indefinitely after it ends. has not promised to do so. Ultimately, they intend to move on to the next one.

However, it looks like we won't be seeing the back of Palword for a while. According to the official announcement, Pocket Pair recently formed Palworld Entertainment with Sony to handle "global licensing and merchandising activities related to Palworld outside of interactive games." In other words, whatever Pocket Pair's next game will be, Palworld's success will continue to benefit the studio.

Still, it is not often seen that Mizobe is interested in making more indie games, rather than making a larger-scale follow-up to Palworld. Most studios get bigger and bigger until they can't get it right, and part of the appeal of "Palworld" is that they didn't want to spend their lives making the next game. And it didn't need a big-budget, super-sophisticated experience to attract millions of people. If "Palworld" had been such a game, the risk of failure would have been catastrophic, so it is little wonder that Pocket Pairs did not attempt to dramatically alter its strategy.