Hugely Successful Palworld CEO on YOLO Budgeting

A new star was born in January when a little known developer Pocket Pair dropped its new game ‘Palworld’ onto game marketplaces Steam, Epic and Xbox Game Pass. The influences are clear, and the casual description of the game prior to release was “Pokemon but with guns” or in other words “Pokemon if they lived in America”. The actual gameplay is more involved, with base building and automation powered by fake-mon slave labour. But long story short in four days they sold 6 million copies and it has quickly become the second most played game on Steam ever, sitting just behind PUBG. It has outsold heavy hitters like Last Of Us 2.

Pocket Pair CEO Takuro Mizobe has been modest about his companies success, admitting to a rather cavalier attitude towards money and budgets. In a note (machine translated from Japanese) he said that he didn’t bother managing the studios budget.

“It would be impossible for a decent company to develop a game without managing the budget,” he said. “Pocket Pair is not a decent company.”

They released a trailer to see what the reaction would be. When it blew up they knew they were onto something. And scope for the game they were intending to release in just one year expanded.

“At that point, we had no idea what the game would actually look like. So we thought backwards. What is the upper limit of the budget? The most obvious limit would be right at the edge of the company’s bankruptcy.”

“When it reaches zero, you can go into debt. In that case, do we need to manage the budget?”

“No. Just borrow or release enough to bring the account balance to zero, just before the company goes bankrupt.”

The bill for the game totaled about US$6.75 million he has estimated, with the caveat that he’s too scared to check. Essentially they worked on the game until they ran out of money, and released it into early access to keep the lights on. Miraculously the game was in a functional enough state to be a product that people could actually start playing, somewhat of a rarity in the gaming world.

“[I]t’s still barely ready to go into Early Access, and it’s far from truly complete,” Mizobe says. “For the time being, it is in a state where it can be put out into the world.”

Reviews have been positive and they’ve got enough runway to finish the game. We hope.

Do we recommend this method to any budding CEOs? Absolutely not! But when you think you’ve got a firecracker of a product, it’s worth seeing it through, no matter the cost.