Palworld, the highly controversial but mostly fine “Pokémon With Guns” monster tamer game from Pocketpair, has reached over 25 million players on PC and Xbox. That’s already a whole lot of people playing the legally distinct knock-off of Game Freak’s RPGs, but why stop there when there are other platforms with other people who might play your game? Based on a cryptic tweet by Pocketpair’s global community manager, it seems like Palworld might be coming to PlayStation, where it could potentially pull a great deal more players into its open-world survival action.
“Bucky,” the Palworld community manager, tweeted a message on Saturday, June 22, that might look like it means nothing at a glance, but fans are speculating it’s actually a tease for a PlayStation version of Pocketpair’s survival game.
The tweet says “Palworld” surrounded by heart emojis, specifically black, white, and green ones. Then Bucky says “I want to add more hearts, but not sure what colour would fit…hmm…how about….” before adding a blue one to the line-up. Fans believe the emojis are references to the different platforms Palworld is on (green for Xbox, black for PC, white for Mac) and that the blue one is meant to imply a PS5 version could be imminent.
Palworld has a big update scheduled for Thursday, June 27, which adds a new island and new pal creatures to fight and capture, as well as dedicated servers for the Xbox version that have been missing since the game launched in Early Access in January. With a big expansion coming, it would be a good time to put the game on a new platform. Whether that happens in a shadow drop on Thursday or if it will get a proper rollout and promotional window remains to be seen.
While Palworld was a viral sensation when it launched, it feels like the game has now comfortably found its niche. Though the game was by all metrics a success, some Pokémon fans have not taken kindly to how overtly its monsters resemble the ones from Game Freak’s games. The controversy got so big that The Pokémon Company put out a statement that it would “investigate” Palworld, but nothing has publicly come out about it since and Pocketpair doesn’t seem worried.
