Pocketpair says Palworld will leave Early Access and hit version 1.0 in 2026, teasing a “massive” update and “more surprises” for the rest of 2025. The note went up on the studio’s official site alongside a short roadmap video and a look back at the game’s runaway year and a half in Early Access.
The monster-taming, open-world survival-crafting hit first exploded in January 2024—Pocketpair reported 15 million PC copies in the first month plus 10 million players on Xbox via Game Pass—before settling into a cadence of big patches and collabs.
Pocketpair also recapped the studio’s scrappy development history: the project began small, scaled up over several years, and narrowly avoided running out of cash before its Early Access breakthrough. Team size expanded from roughly ten to dozens with contractors as the scope grew.
All of this plays out against an ongoing legal backdrop. Nintendo and The Pokémon Company filed suit in Japan in 2024 alleging that elements of Palworld infringe Pokémon-related patents; the dispute remains active in 2025 and has stirred debate as Nintendo secured additional patents while the case rumbles on.
Pocketpair hasn’t dated its next drop beyond promising more content this year and a full 1.0 push in 2026—including long-teased features like the World Tree update. We’ll keep an eye on any reveals at Tokyo Game Show 2025 later this month and what that “massive” update actually packs in.
