The latest trend in the live service hype train is full speed ahead and it appears Palworld is leading the charge. Not one to be left behind, Tencent is looking to capitalize on the success of the Pocket Pair wunderkind.
According to a report by Bloomberg, Tencent has tasked Timi and Lightspeed, two of its most acclaimed studios, to create their versions of Palworld. The report states that Tencent is asking the pair of studios to make a game that’s “replete with pet companions and stylized violence.”
While Timi and Lightspeed operate autonomously, the mandate suggests that Tencent is looking for its next payday and what better way to do it than having its two best teams compete against each other. The world’s largest video game publisher is replicating the same competitive environment that led Timi and Lightspeed to create Honor of Kings and Peacekeeper Elite, respectively, years ago. The two aforementioned games continue to be Tencent’s most profitable titles years after their initial release.
Pocket Pair is a relatively small studio that intends to keep it that way despite having a massively successful hit like Palworld under their belt already. After outselling last year’s best-selling game, Hogwarts Legacy, in record time, the hype surrounding Palworld has mellowed. But, it’s only one update away from going viral again. Thus, it’s no wonder Tencent wants to get in on the action.
Of course, wanting to make a game that has the premise of “Pokemonwith guns” is a lot easier said than done.
So many others have tried before and most have failed. Not only that, but the potential lawsuit is a real risk Tencent will have to deal with.
Palworld may have avoided a lawsuit from Nintendo, but what’s to say that Tencent’ can make a distinct enough game from the best-selling creature hunting franchise to avoid legal repercussions, let alone two of them?
Just two years ago, The Pokémon Company sued six Chinese companies for “copyright infringement and unfair competition behavior,” for basically copying Pokémon.
Given that a potential selling point for Tencent is to merge gameplay mechanics from Pokémon with Peacekeeper Elite but make it open-world and fun, there’s no doubt that Tencent’s upcoming pair of Pokémon-like games will sell like hotcakes in China. However, escaping Nintendo’s lawyers are a different thing entirely.
For what it’s worth, Tencent are close partners with Nintendo. The two worked together to set up Nintendo’s retail presence in the country, which allowed the Japanese giant to sell the Nintendo Switch in China for the first time on December 10, 2019.
So, maybe, just maybe, Tencent does know what it’s doing and can get away clean.
Either way, it’ll be interesting to see what Tencent and other studios will come up with as they try to capture the same lightning in the bottle that Pocket Pair caught earlier this year.
