Front Burner - Is Palworld more than ‘Pokémon with guns’?

Episode Date: January 30, 2024

Pokémon is the single biggest grossing media franchise on the planet. So when a game best described as "Pokémon with guns" was released earlier this month, it's perhaps no surprise that it quickly became one of the most played — and talked about — video games in the world. Washington Post video game critic and reporter Gene Park explains why the game has blown up, and whether the developers might find themselves in Nintendo's legal crosshairs for copying their homework. For transcripts of Front Burner, please visit: https://www.cbc.ca/radio/frontburner/transcripts Transcripts of each episode will be made available by the next workday.

In the Dragon's Den, a simple pitch can lead to a life-changing connection. Watch new episodes of Dragon's Den free on CBC Gem. Brought to you in part by National Angel Capital Organization, empowering Canada's entrepreneurs through angel investment and industry connections. This is a CBC Podcast. Hi, I'm Damon Fairless. I'm Damon Fairless. So, Pokemon is the highest-grossing media franchise of all time. For almost 30 years, it's had this winning formula, befriending and doing battle with hundreds of adorable monsters like Pikachu and Charizard.

But what if they had guns? That's the question posed, and also answered by the new video game, Pow World. Seems like a Pokemon spinoff. But looks pretty good. Fly... Okay, what...

Does she have a machine gun? It's an Eevee. Does it have a gun? Oh. Right into Gy a gun? Oh. Right in a Gyarados? Oh my gosh. Literally. Wow.

See? Oh my God. What? Earlier this month, Power World was released with pretty much no marketing. And over a single weekend, it became one of the most played video games in the world. But some have accused the game's developers of plagiarism, and now the company behind Pokemon says it plans to investigate whether Palworld is infringing on its intellectual property.

My guest today is Gene Park. He covers video games for the Washington Post, and he's going to walk us through why this game has blown up, and whether it might find itself in the crosshairs of one of the most litigious video game companies in the world. Hey Gene, it's good to have you back on Frontburner. Thanks for coming on. Glad to be back. Okay, so I've watched some videos on YouTube, but I haven't had a chance to play Power World.

So can you start by describing it? What exactly is Power World? has to play Pow World. So can you start by describing it? What exactly is Pow World? Yeah. Pow World is a game that was announced in 2021. Okay. Basically showing cute critters that look suspiciously like Pokemon.

Right. That was the game released earlier this month and people were actually able to get a hands-on on it. And also the CEO of the studio, developing studio Pocket Pair has said that Power Word is not really so much like a Pokemon type game but more like a survival game, closer to games like Ark or Minecraft or Valheim. where you're running around and you're picking up uh you know wood and crafts and food you have to eat you have to find shelter and power world is really kind of like an automation

type game where you get you're getting all your pals just like pokemon but rather than uh forcing in a fight like in a cockfighting type of situation in power world you're bringing them back to your base and you're giving them different work assignments you have to use certain types of pals to do different types of jobs right like different ones over here you see like on your workbench, it says here required handiwork. That is a specific skill that not all pals have. Only some of them have this. So like it's a forced labor game, not a smashing each other game? Exactly. Yeah.

That's pretty much what it is. Okay. And it depends on what kind of labor master you would like to be. Okay. So you've been playing it, right? So what have you been doing with them? Yeah, so that's exactly what I did. I ran around and I started gathering all my pals. And then when I brought them back to my camp,

I brought back a little penguin pal that's a good water type pal. And in Pokemon, you would want your water type Pokemon to fight the fire type Pokemon. Makes sense. But in PAL world, I wanted the water type Pokemon to come back to my base and start watering my fields. Okay. I mean, it really sounds like indentured labor. So, okay. So, but this, this idea of it being like Pokemon with guns, is, is, is there anything to that?

So, but this, this idea of it being like Pokemon with guns, is, is, is there anything to that? Uh, yeah. Uh, the CEO, uh, really wanted this game to take off in America. And so he cynically, uh, uh, suspected, Hey, what if we put guns in his game? I think Americans will really like it. Fair enough. And it turns out his instincts were exactly correct. So, okay.

So in addition, so yeah, I understand you get your buddies to do your work for you. Fair. And then what do you do with the guns? Well, it's a dangerous world out there, right? The pals can, there can be monstrous pals, right? Yeah. Okay. And there could be nefarious never do elves

out in the world. And sometimes they might attack your base. And then, so you, you'd want to have defenses around your base. So you would arm your little pals with guns. So in my base, called the Washington Post and Pow World, I arm my little monkeys with mounted turret guns. Okay, I'm upset. The worst thing ever happened to us.

Heard of ferocious wild pals is invading the base. Raid! We've spent countless hours on a beautiful castle. To arms! We've got a problem. It kind of feeds back into, you know, an American sense of paranoia and self-defense, right? Okay, so this game came out on January 19th. That's about a week and a half ago now. And it's popular, but like crazy popular, right?

Like how well is it doing? Yeah, so since January 19, as far as we know, it has sold about 8 million copies, which is untold for a video game that just comes out of nowhere, isn't attached to any kind of IP. You know, you would expect a Spider-Man game or a Harry Potter game to sell this much, but no, this is Power World. Literally, we didn't even know that this game was coming out on january 19 until two weeks before that and then now uh power world has seen uh has broken the records and is now in a second most concurrently played game of all time on on the pc steam platform uh with two million people at any given moment uh uh playing power world at any given moment it's it's incredible

and in my understanding it's not, the version that people are playing now, it isn't even a finished version, right? It's like an early release or something like that? Exactly. Okay, so you mentioned it is different than Pokemon in the sense that you're not battling, your pals aren't battling the way Pokemon

characters are battling. There are guns, which there aren't in Pokemon, but I mean, it sounds pretty Pokemon-y. So how much of the popularity that we've seen since its release has to do with that resemblance, do you think? Is this just riding Pokemon's coattails? I think it's absolutely riding Pokemon's coattails. No doubt about it. I think definitely a lot of the popularity has to do with Pokemon.

Pokemon is often cited and it probably is the most successful and most popular intellectual property in the world. So why not write on Pokemon's coattails? But I think it also speaks to how the market is missing a high-budget, beautiful-looking Pokemon game. One of the biggest complaints in the Pokemon community is that the Pokemon company itself has kind of become stagnant and a little bit, quote-unquote, lazy.

It's probably one of the harsher criticisms of the Pokemon company when it comes to basically creating a game that's very formulaic. It's really the same kind of game that's been released since the 90s. And here comes Power World. kind of game that's been released since the 90s and here comes power world and uh part of the real draw power wall is that it allows you to have player interactions with your pals you know and pokemon uh when you pick up a pokemon all you let them do is fight fight fight fight so the ironic thing is that even though power world is pokemon with guns and it sounds a lot more violent there could be long stretches of moment to moment where Power World is a far less violent game than Pokemon actually is. You mentioned that one of the criticisms of Pokemon is that the game itself has been kind of flat.

And it's interesting because I was looking at figures. So the franchise has made something like $150 billion since it started. But only $30 billion of that comes from the game. So it's kind of like a platform for merch, more or less. That's where the profit's coming from. So is that a fair criticism? Is Pokemon gotten kind of boring and this is just filling in that niche of what Pokemon fans want?

Yeah, totally. I think, you know, the recent Pokemon games have been selling quite well, I think because Pokemon just has a very large built-in audience. But critically, it hasn't really performed all that well. And also, technically, the games are kind of a mess. They don't run very well. They're very famously a little bit ugly.

Whereas Power World, even though it's in quote-unquote early access, as we discussed earlier, it kind of looks a lot better than any Pokemon game we've ever seen before. So, I guess, you know, the parallels are obvious. I'm curious what the game's developer, the company Pocket Fur you talked about earlier, I wonder what they've said in response to the accusations that they're, you know, copying or writing Pokemon's coattails. Yeah, they came out with a comment recently, mostly about asking people to stop harassing their artists. Our artists did original work, et cetera, et cetera. But they also did say, you know, we are clearly inspired by Pokemon, but we did do our own twist on it. So that's pretty much all they said right now. They're a very small company, and I think the success of this game has really overwhelmed them.

Now they're flush with cash, and it really depends on what they do with the cash, whether they go on a hiring spree or really just build up the company. But right now, interviews with the CEO have been very rare, if at all. And they just kind of clamped up and just kind of went back to work on the game. In the Dragon's Den, a simple pitch can lead to a life-changing connection. Watch new episodes of Dragon's Den free on CBC Gem. Brought to you in part by National Angel Capital Organization. Empowering Canada's entrepreneurs through angel investment and industry connections. Hi, it's Ramit Sethi here.

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That's because money is confusing. In my new book and podcast, Money for Couples, I help you and your partner create a financial vision together. To listen to this podcast, just search for Money for Couples. inspired by another Nintendo game too. I'm just thinking that they were accused of ripping off The Legend of Zelda, Breath of the Wild, right? Yeah, in a previous game called Craftopia. But that one wasn't successful. And that one was also an early access and still is. So definitely, it's not the first time,

but Power World is definitely their largest success and definitely the biggest target in terms of such criticisms. And Nintendo, you know, doesn't play nice necessarily with, you know, copyright infringement. So they, you know, they're pretty prone to taking legal action. So, and I should note here that the Pokemon brand is managed by a separate company, aptly enough called the Pokemon Company. I'm curious what Nintendo's reaction has been along with the Pokemon Company.

What have they said about Power World? Right now, Nintendo, well, the Pokemon Company itself released a statement basically acknowledging, it's kind of like a public statement equivalent of acknowledging receipt of an email, but they basically acknowledge the existence of Power World. And they did say that they would protect their IP within Power World. And so there was an independent developer who created a quote-unquote mod

which changes the game's code that input actual Pokemon characters and Pokemon creatures into Power World unofficially. And then Nintendo lawyers went after that person and then that person had to take the stuff down. So Nintendo's lawyers are very, very fast. As you said, Nintendo is a very, very litigious company. Nintendo loves its lawyers so much, they, one, have named their video games after them,

and two, have elevated them into executive positions in the past, too. Sorry, I just want to follow up on that. They've named video games after their lawyers? Oh, yeah, sure. Kirby, the character Kirby is named after the lawyer who helped them win their lawsuit when it came to the rights over Donkey Kong. Wow. Okay, you really do learn something every day. So once the player, you know, the fan made that mod

that you talked about that allowed them to kind of import actual Pokemon characters into Pal world. Nintendo was really quick to act on that and send out a, you know, a copyright notice, but they haven't, you know, more broadly speaking with the game, what's the difference do you think? Why, why the hesitation for, you know, more broadly speaking with the game, what's the difference do you think? Why the hesitation for, you know, kind of jumping on it legally?

Yeah, as you might imply, Nintendo hasn't really done anything with Power World yet. And especially since many of the more egregious Pokemon looking designs were really seen in the 2021 trailer as well. And Bloomberg actually had a piece recently where they asked two attorneys uh two entertainment media attorneys to take a look at power roll and they actually played power for 10 hours uh which is actually just a little bit less of the amount of time that

i played power roll and uh they both came to the conclusion that they're like i don't think they have a case here i don't't think there's nothing really here. They're too dissimilar. And another attorney friend of mine who looks at video game IP rights law quite often, Richard Hogue, Hogue Law, he also took a look, and he said, I don't think there's anything quite here to really give a fuss about. So that seems to be the consensus right now. So it doesn't sound like Nintendo's got a case per se, but why not?

It just seems so, when I look at Pokemon side by side and I look at compared to the Power World, it seems like I'm not sure I would be able to differentiate, to be honest. So why do you think there isn't a case or why do those legal experts think that? Sure. I think it comes down to how copyright law interprets pieces of work. For example, like how you might interpret a dance, right? A dance move. You can't really copyright a dance move. I can do, for example, the MC Hammer dance all day on TV, no problem. But you could copyright a choreography,

which is a sequence of dances. And I think that's what Power World basically is. It is a successful replication of different types of dances of all types across the video game industry, whether it's Pokemon or Ark, whatever like that, and they were able to successfully

create a sequence of dances that is the power of choreography that we see today you know you know i think about this more broadly, because it's not just video games, but, you know, art in general is, you know, the new form is always inspired by the older form. Video games in particular, you know, you've written are quite iterative. So it's really common for games to take inspiration from one another. for games to take inspiration from one another. I mean, even I was thinking, I played the Uncharted series recently and I was, the whole time I was thinking, man, this is basically Tomb Raider,

right? But they're clearly different games. I, you know, they didn't feel like I was in the same world. Where is the line between inspiration and plagiarizing? Is it, is it in that choreography analogy you've, you mentioned?

I think plagiarism is a tough accusation to place against Power World, especially because when you think about plagiarism, it's copying someone's work, right? Exactly what it is. There is no Pikachu equivalent in Power World. Power World was very careful to make sure not to even touch what is often considered the perfect design of Pikachu. But also, Power World makes no bones about where it gets its inspiration.

Power World is clearly inspired by Pokemon, and they cited Pokemon by name several times before. So there's also that. I think they're very, very clear about where they take their inspirations from. I think that kind of helps Power World's case in terms of at least how the public looks at them. They say, well, at least they're being honest about it. The question I have for you is, you're familiar with both, I guess in your opinion, from a creative point of view, from a game play point of view, do you think

Palworld's encroached or stepped over a line? No, I wondered about that, but I did think that maybe like a couple designs looked a little similar. But once I actually got into Power World and I started seeing these creatures moving and the way they behaved, and once I started to see more diversity in the creatures,

I was like, there's plenty here to differentiate it. It certainly feels like a different vibe. It definitely certainly feels like I'm playing a different game. I think maybe what interests me the most here is that you've got this small company that's made Power World. And, you know, I get the sense it's almost like

a Ma and Pa shop compared to a juggernaut like Nintendo. But they've come in with this game. It's doing super well by kind of doing the thing that Pokemon said it had to do, but in a way that fans are really appreciating more. So I guess my question is, what do you think this story tells us about the state of video games and the video game industry and gaming culture right now? I think it really shows how diverse the video game industry has really become and how there's so many different avenues for certain companies to make it. You know, certainly some of the biggest games in recent years have come from independent

companies, games like Among Us. And it looks like Power Wars is kind of becoming part of that trend, you know? All right. Well, I'm going to let you get back to your empire building with your machine gun monkeys and penguins and stuff. No, I really appreciate it. Thanks for coming on, Gene. Thanks for having me.

Appreciate it. Okay, that's all for today. I'm Damon Fairless. Thanks for listening to FrontBurner. I'll talk to you tomorrow.