Anyone with even a slight interest in the games industry can tell you that making a game is pretty expensive. The biggest blockbuster out there can cost hundreds of millions, so it’s important to ensure that you stick to a budget to make sure you don’t go overboard on spending. That’s what most developers do anyway, butPalworlddeveloper Pocketpair recently revealed it had a novel approach to game development, instead choosing to ignore a budget and keep developing until the studio ran out of money.
This is according toa recent post by Pocketpair on Note.com(thanksInsider Gaming) detailing all kinds of struggles and obstacles during development. In this post, it’s explained that Palworld eventually ended up costing the studio roughly one billion yen to make, which is roughly $6.75 million today. Not exactly a huge sum when compared to the big wigs likePlayStationandXbox, but absolutely massive for a relatively obscure indie studio.
This is apparently because Pocketpair CEO Takuro Mizobe wanted to develop the game “without worrying about the budget”, instead choosing to keep working until “the bank account balance reaches zero”. He claims that instead of setting a budget like a normal studio does, he just decided that the upper limit of Palworld’s budget would simply be running out of money. After that, the team would either borrow money from other sources, or would just release what they already had.
Mizobe also states that he doesn’t really know what Palworld’s budget really was as he ignored it so much, determining that it was roughly one billion yen as Pocketpair burned through the earnings from its previous game, Craftopia.
It’s absolutely wild for an indie developer to take such a risk like that, especially one that originally didn’t even intend for Palworld to be a big game. Earlier in the post, Mizobe explains that the team at Pocketpair originally wanted to start development and then release the game within the span of one year, claiming that he “never had the desire to create a large-scale title”, and only had a team of four people working on it to start with.
Palworld was also originally supposed to only have 25 monsters, and the game would then be pushed out to gauge reactions from the public. However, the reaction to the game’s trailer forced the team at Pocketpair to rethink the game’s scope, with the Mizobe having hired over 40 people during the game’s development time. Safe to say, it was worth the extra effort, as I doubt Pocketpair is struggling for money right now afterhaving amassed millions players in just a few days.
