The developers of Palworld repeatedly counter their haters in a funny way. This time they have to defend themselves against accusations that they are only successful because they have secret investors.
What are these allegations? The origin of the accusations came from Highguard. The game was announced in the last slot at the Game Awards, which is traditionally reserved for promising blockbusters. However, the shooter flew under the radar of the players, and the studio had to lay off the first developers just 3 weeks after release.
Recently, reports surfaced that Highguard was secretly funded with money from the Chinese tech giant Tencent (as read on Game File). This led to wild speculation on X: Highguard only got the coveted spot at the Game Awards because Tencent’s Vice President Steve Ma sits on the board of the Game Awards under organizer Geoff Keighley.
As part of the conspiracy theories, Palworld was also mentioned. According to some players, its massive success is also supposedly due to secret investor money, possibly even from Tencent, the fans said on Reddit. Geoff Keighley has posted so much about Palworld because he is involved with the game.
But the developers do not take this sitting down and have responded to the claims.
Developers of Palworld defend against accusations
What do the developers say? The Head of Publishing & Communications at Pocketpair, John “Bucky” Buckley, once again defends against the accusations. He has had to dismiss other criticism in the past and counters with a direct manner.
He clarified on BlueSky:
I never thought that Palworld would be involved in any way. Palworld has no investors, no backers, no sponsors. Geoff and no one else has shares or stakes in Palworld. We are 100% independent and self-financing. I believe Geoff is just enjoying the excitement around our launch!
What is the connection between Palworld and Tencent? If you think of a connection between Palworld and Tencent, it is probably this one: Tencent has apparently commissioned several studios to develop a game like Palworld. The goal is to create a better game than the inspiration.
Additionally, Pocketpair uses Tencent Cloud for Palworld (as read on prnewswire.com). This is the server division of Tencent, where they are supposed to maintain huge multiplayer servers stably. However, this has nothing to do with the funding of the game.
The CEO of Palworld revealed his thoughts on such competing games as those from Tencent. He is even happy about such titles that have a much larger budget, as he reveals here: Palworld CEO speaks about clones of his game with 10 times larger budgets.
