Pocketpair communications director John Buckley has spoken about potentially bringing Palworld to the Nintendo Switch 2. Despite the legal troubles between Pocketpair and Nintendo, the studio would considering bringing Palworld to the Switch 2 if the console were powerful enough to run the game.
In a conversation with IGN during Game Developer’s Conference 2025, Buckley revealed that a big reason for Palworld not coming to the original Nintendo Switch was technical in nature. Referring to Palworld as “a beefy game,” Buckley said that “if we could make the game work on the Switch, we would.”
Buckley then spoke about the potential of releasing Palworld on the Switch 2. However, the studio is yet to get its hands on the development hardware for the upcoming console. Because of this, Pocketpair isn’t yet sure if the Switch 2 could handle Palworld.
“We haven’t seen those specs yet,” said Buckley. “Like everyone else, we’re waiting. I’m walking around GDC hoping someone will tell me them, but everyone I’ve spoken to says they haven’t even seen them.”
Buckley brings up the fact that the studio did quite a bit of optimisation work on Palworld in order for the game to run smoothly on the Steam Deck. However, despite the optimisations on the developer’s side of things, the hardware still has to be powerful enough to run the game to begin with.
“If it’s beefy enough, it’s 100% worth considering,” said Buckley. “We did a lot of optimization for Steam Deck, which we were really happy with. Still work to do, but we’re really happy with how it turned out. So we would like to get it on more handhelds if possible.”
During a talk at GDC 2025 earlier this month, Buckley also spoke about the success of Palworld, and how it came as a complete surprise to the studio. While the studio had initially thought it would be a game that would capture a niche Japanese audience, it quickly got more than a million wishlists within the first year of its announcement.
When it came time to launch the game, Buckley said that the studio only got to take a small break from work to celebrate. They quickly had to get back to work, however, since the game was suffering from quite a few network-related issues on launch day.
“Not a lot of people know this, but most of our company at that time was a remote company,” Buckley said. “We had an office, but very few people went to the office. But everyone went on launch day. It was going to be a little celebration, a little bit of alcohol, a little bit of fun, and then go home. So we launched the game, went over to the vending machine, and started drinking. About 20 minutes later, our network engineer, our one network engineer, said the game has crashed. The Epic servers have crashed. That’s when things started to get weird.”
Palworld ultimately proved to be incredibly successful. Back in February, Pocketpair had revealed that more than 32 million players had played Palworld across all platforms. The game is available on PC, PS5, Xbox One and Xbox Series X/S. Read our review for more details.
