Pocketpair, the studio behind Palworld, has revealed through a recent interview that the game development industry doesn’t seem to have any money going around at the moment. Speaking to GamesRadar at GDC 2025, Pocketpair communications director and publishing manager John Buckley spoke about the studio getting pitches from other development teams after the release of Palworld.
“No one has money at the moment. Minutes, that’s not even a joke; minutes after Palworld released and that started to happen, people were sending us pitches even though we weren’t a publisher,” said Buckley. “I think there was just this desperate, you know, ‘we need money’ that’s going on right now, and a lot of people contacted us.”
“To our surprise, it wasn’t just little two-man teams or something,” continued Buckley. “Some really big names contacted us, you know, AAA, AA, premium indies, all these contacts.”
Pocketpair had announced that it would be publishing games back in January. As part of this move, the company is helping Tales of Kenzera: Zau developer Surgent Studios with an unannounced new horror game. Buckley spoke about how the company had begun to hear out studio pitches as it was getting its publishing arm ready.
“We started meeting these people very early last year, listening to ideas,” explained Buckley. “And we were very honest. We said, hey, we’re not publishers or anything, but we’ll listen. And we talked about it a lot internally. What can we do? What can we not do?”
“We want to help cool indies get made. We want to help cool, premium indie, kind of AAs get made.”
Not many details about the first title with Surgent Studios have been revealed so far, except for the fact that it will be a horror game. Studio founder Abubakar Salim (also the voice of Bayek in Assassin’s Creed Origins), spoke about the opportunity his studio was getting through Pocketpair.
“We noticed a pattern in the entertainment industry, and Pocketpair has given us the opportunity to make a horror game about it,” said Salim. “Both Surgent and Pocketpair are well versed in taking risks. This game will be short and weird, and we think players will be interested in what we have to say.”
Buckley had spoken about the studio’s publishing arm being created in order to help more indie studios get their games made back in January. Taking to social media, Buckley commented on how quickly game pitches started coming in after the publishing arm was announced. He also spoke about wanting to give smaller studios financial independence to make their games.
“We give you money. You make the game,” posted Buckley. “If you want help with marketing or something we’ll help out, but otherwise do whatever you want. “We’re giving devs the financial freedom to make games they want so they DON’T have to get wrapped up in stinky rule makers and bullies.”
Pocketpair has been able to kickstart its publishing arm in a bid to help smaller developers thanks to the massive success seen by its game Palworld. According to a report from back in February, Palworld has been played by more than 32 million players so far. For context, the game was developed on a budget of $6.7 million.
