Pocketpair communications director John Buckley has spoken about probably bringing Palworld to the Nintendo Swap 2. Regardless of the authorized troubles between Pocketpair and Nintendo, the studio would contemplating bringing Palworld to the Swap 2 if the console had been highly effective sufficient to run the sport.
In a dialog with IGN throughout Sport Developer’s Convention 2025, Buckley revealed {that a} huge motive for Palworld not coming to the unique Nintendo Swap was technical in nature. Referring to Palworld as “a beefy recreation,” Buckley mentioned that “if we might make the sport work on the Swap, we might.”
Buckley then spoke in regards to the potential of releasing Palworld on the Swap 2. Nonetheless, the studio is but to get its fingers on the event {hardware} for the upcoming console. Due to this, Pocketpair isn’t but certain if the Swap 2 might deal with Palworld.
“We haven’t seen these specs but,” mentioned Buckley. “Like everybody else, we’re ready. I’m strolling round GDC hoping somebody will inform me them, however everybody I’ve spoken to says they haven’t even seen them.”
Buckley brings up the truth that the studio did fairly a little bit of optimisation work on Palworld to ensure that the sport to run easily on the Steam Deck. Nonetheless, regardless of the optimisations on the developer’s facet of issues, the {hardware} nonetheless needs to be highly effective sufficient to run the sport to start with.
“If it’s beefy sufficient, it’s 100% price contemplating,” mentioned Buckley. “We did a number of optimization for Steam Deck, which we had been actually pleased with. Nonetheless work to do, however we’re actually pleased with the way it turned out. So we want to get it on extra handhelds if attainable.”
Throughout a chat at GDC 2025 earlier this month, Buckley additionally spoke in regards to the success of Palworld, and the way it got here as a whole shock to the studio. Whereas the studio had initially thought it will be a recreation that might seize a distinct segment Japanese viewers, it rapidly acquired greater than one million wishlists throughout the first 12 months of its announcement.
When it got here time to launch the sport, Buckley mentioned that the studio solely acquired to take a small break from work to have fun. They rapidly needed to get again to work, nonetheless, because the recreation was affected by fairly just a few network-related points on launch day.
“Not lots of people know this, however most of our firm at the moment was a distant firm,” Buckley mentioned. “We had an workplace, however only a few folks went to the workplace. However everybody went on launch day. It was going to be a bit celebration, a bit little bit of alcohol, a bit little bit of enjoyable, after which go dwelling. So we launched the sport, went over to the merchandising machine, and began consuming. About 20 minutes later, our community engineer, our one community engineer, mentioned the sport has crashed. The Epic servers have crashed. That’s when issues began to get bizarre.”
Palworld finally proved to be extremely profitable. Again in February, Pocketpair had revealed that greater than 32 million gamers had performed Palworld throughout all platforms. The sport is on the market on PC, PS5, Xbox One and Xbox Collection X/S. Learn our overview for extra particulars.
