Pocketpair clears up who builds each Palworld: the MMO is Garena's, the port is Krafton's

Last week we covered Garena confirming Palworld Online, a licensed mobile MMO. The news since isn't the game itself: it's that Pocketpair had to step in and explain who actually builds each thing carrying the Palworld name.

John "Bucky" Buckley, the studio's head of publishing, answered the flood of messages he was getting about the card game and the MMO: "a lot of these things are actually not made by us, so I can't really help with your questions much." He also posted a chart laying out the split.

The split: Pocketpair develops Palworld, Craftopia, Palfarm and More Than Just Pals. Palworld Online belongs to Garena under license. Palworld Mobile, the version aiming to replicate the original survival game on phones, comes from Krafton. The trading card game came out of a separate external deal.

That leaves two different mobile games, from two different companies, on the same IP, and neither one coded by the studio that made Palworld. Buckley added a second clarification aimed at the suspicion these deals usually attract: "We are STILL 100% self-owned and self-funded."

The original game stays in Pocketpair's hands: it hit version 1.0 on July 10 and the studio celebrated 40 million players and a peak of 850,000 concurrents on Steam. Neither Garena nor Krafton has given a firm date or a business model for their versions.