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} large purpose 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 concerning the potential of releasing Palworld on the Swap 2. Nonetheless, the studio is but to get its palms on the event {hardware} for the upcoming console. Due to this, Pocketpair isn’t but positive 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 aspect of issues, the {hardware} nonetheless must 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 plenty of optimization for Steam Deck, which we had been actually proud of. Nonetheless work to do, however we’re actually proud of the way it turned out. So we want to get it on extra handhelds if doable.”
Throughout a chat at GDC 2025 earlier this month, Buckley additionally spoke concerning the success of Palworld, and the way it got here as a whole shock to the studio. Whereas the studio had initially thought it could be a recreation that will seize a distinct segment Japanese viewers, it shortly bought greater than 1,000,000 wishlists throughout the first yr of its announcement.
When it got here time to launch the sport, Buckley mentioned that the studio solely bought to take a small break from work to rejoice. They shortly 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 house. So we launched the sport, went over to the merchandising machine, and began ingesting. 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 obtainable on PC, PS5, Xbox One and Xbox Collection X/S. Learn our assessment for extra particulars.
