Dina Bass / Bloomberg:
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Tom Warren / The Verge:
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Duncan Riley / SiliconANGLE:
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Developer Pocketpair has announced that its hit creature-catching open-world survival game, Palworld, is finally launching out of Early Access and into version 1.0 in 2026. Palworld has been available in Early Access since January 2024, and centers on catching Pokémon-esque critters called Pals, which you can equip with guns to battle other monsters while aiding players in farming and crafting. 

In a developer update video, Pocketpair promises that a “massive amount of content” is being planned for the 1.0 update. However, the studio also acknowledges it wants to clean up Palworld’s remaining technical bugs before it hits 1.0.  

As such, the studio says the rest of 2025 will be “a little quiet from us” as it focuses on preparing the game for its full launch. Because cleaning up the game will be its primary focus, Pocketpair says its Winter update won’t be as big as last year’s Feybreak Island was, but stresses development will not slow down or scale back when it launches in full.

The 1.0 announcement comes amidst an ongoing lawsuit with Nintendo, which began last September. The lawsuit, filed by Nintendo and The Pokémon Company, accuses Pocketpair of infringing on several patent rights.

Pocketpair publicly shared three specific patents from the lawsuit on its website, revealing they were registered after Palworld’s EA launch and were likely done to target the game specifically. These patents cover systems for capturing characters in a virtual space, an aiming system for deploying capture items, and rideable characters. Nintendo and The Pokémon Company seek payments of 5 million yen (plus late payment damages) each. Pocketpair stated it aimed to “assert our position in this case through future legal proceedings.”

Since launching into Early Access, Palworld has received five major updates introducing new Pals, raid battles,  an arena mode, new landmasses like Feybreak and the island of Sakurajima, new factions, and even a crossover with Terraria. Pocketpair has also introduced many quality-of-life improvements and mechanics, such as cross-play.

Palworld is currently on sale for 25 percent off for a limited time on Steam. Palworld took the world by storm when it first launched into Early Access on Steam and Xbox Series X/S in January 2024, amassing over 25 million players within its first month of availability and becoming the third-biggest launch on Xbox Game Pass at the time. It even has a spin-off dating sim in the works. 

Palworld is currently available on PlayStation 5, Xbox Series X/S, Xbox One, PC, and Mac. You can learn all about the game's origin and the history of its developer, Pocketpair, in our studio profile.