Palworld started as a factory game like Satisfactory

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Palworld 1.0 is finally here, over two years on from its monumental early-access launch, but once upon a time, Pocketpair's creature-collecting survival game could have fallen into a very different genre – albeit still with all the cute Pals that fans have grown to love.

While often compared to Pokemon when it comes to its creature collecting aspects, and the likes of Ark with its survival gameplay, speaking in a recent interview with Game8 , head of communications and publishing at Pocketpair John "Bucky" Buckley explains that Palworld was originally supposed to be a factory game like Satisfactory.

"It started life as, 'Wouldn't it be fun to have a factory game like Satisfactory, but instead of machines, it was little creatures? Wouldn't it be fun if those little creatures were each their own individual, rather than just miscellaneous creatures that were working? Wouldn't it be fun if [there was] creature collecting?'" he begins. "And then it turned into open world and survival crafting naturally. The game has changed a lot from the original concept, but I think the core idea of Factory Sim with your Pals is still there."

Of course, we can still see some elements of Palworld's factory sim inspirations in the game today. Your Pals are capable of using workbenches to craft things for you, for example, or farm things for you.

It makes me wonder if Pocketpair could ever release a spin-off that leans even more into the factory sim genre in the future. After all, the devs are already making Palfarm – you guessed it, a farming game – as well as, uh, Palworld ~ More than Just Pals, a dating sim which (for better or worse) isn't an elaborate April Fool's Day joke .

Palworld devs "had high expectations for 1.0," but with over 855,000 concurrent Steam players, lead says "this is staggering."