Naughty Dog Developer Removes Cheating Allegations On Palworld Amidst Backlash

A senior artist at Naughty Dog removes tweets accusing Palworld of cheating after facing backlash. Another tech artist working at Sumo Digital Ltd Nina Klos supported their statement claiming Palworld somehow cheated as making games is not easy. 

The Naughty Dog developer says that making a game is hard so Palworld is "cheating" somehow.

Another developer seems to support him.

Disgraceful, at least wait for proof of this "cheating" before accusing them. pic.twitter.com/URpsk41nbn

— PeterOvo (@PeterOvo5) January 22, 2024

Del Walker tweeted on X claiming Palworld was nefariously made. Furthermore, the artist said that making games of that level is not easy and it feels like Pocketpair cheated but he can’t pinpoint how. He seemed to be referring to the plagiarism allegations claiming Palworld made the Pals using the models of Pokemon. A Twitter user byofrog points out the similarities between Pokemon and Pals claiming that Pocketpair copied the 3D silhouette model of many Pokemon. 

Dinossom from #Palworld has a flower that looks sorta similiar to #pokemon's Lilligant. The number of petals is not the same but the meshes are weirdly similar. I think this one might just be a coincidence? I'll show you the mesh node counts. (This model was hard to see…) pic.twitter.com/GuVz2vtnkR

— byo (@byofrog) January 21, 2024

Del Waker later deleted his tweets after facing a ton of backlash from the community. Some fans even managed to capture his tweets and posted them on the official subreddit of Palworld where he was called out for being salty over Palworld’s success. Despite all the allegations, Palworld seems to be doing quite well in numbers with the game managing to secure the second highest player count on Steam.

It also managed to sell over one million copies within hours of its release. So far Nintendo has made no legal move against Pocketpair. The CEO of Pocketpair also revealed that the game has cleared legal reviews. So any action against it by Nintendo seems highly unlikely. 

Pocketpair’s latest venture was released on January 19, 2024, across PC, Xbox One, and Xbox Series X|S. eXputer reviewed the title and rated it 4.5/5 with Rabiya remarking on its challenging combat and well-designed open world while pointing out some major bugs.