The Palworld empire is expanding in the coming months. Besides the base game continuing to grow, there are other releases coming from Pocketpair that’ll utilize the pals, including a dating sim and a Harvest Moon-like, but according to one lead, only the latter is a “true spin-off.”
Over on the official Palworld Discord server, John ‘Bucky’ Buckley, head of communications and publishing at Pocketpair, commented on his view of the upcoming development slate. “Most gamers will consider a spin-off to be very in-line and thematically similar to the original Palworld with some notable twist or gimmick,” he says.
“To that end, really I would only consider Palfarm the true spin-off,” he adds. Calling all of these games spin-offs “would be pretty wrong,” he says in another comment, because they’re “fundamentally completely different.”
Where Palfarm is a proper spin-off, More Than Just Pals is really “just a little goofy thing,” apparently. Well, that “little goofy thing” looks pretty legit from the first trailer and Steam page, and I’m going to guess it’ll have an appropriate price tag.
He does a little rumor control as well, stating “there are not four spin-offs in development.” There’s an MMO in the works, bringing the total known projects up to three, and Pocketpair’s said there are plans for further expansion.
I disagree with Buckley’s definition of what counts as a spin-off, because in my mind anything that’s explicitly part of a franchise is one. Mario Paint is as much a spin-off of the Super Mario games as Luigi’s Mansion, for instance. I’m dubious of any assertion of “most gamers” without corresponding data too – I’m sure lots of people would agree with him, but I also think many won’t think about this that much.
These sound like internal definitions more than anything. Palfarm, a farming sim involving all your friendly pals, is probably a bigger project within Pocketpair than More Than Just Pals, which is essentially a meme writ large. Whatever you’d like to call them, both will do quite well given the install base for Palworld itself, regardless of how weird the latter turns out.