Palworld budget: What did it cost to develop?

With Palworld dominating the internet and proving financially successful, some are naturally curious about how much it cost to make.

Game development isn’t cheap, particularly AAA titles developed within large companies like Sony and Microsoft. Palworld, by comparison, comes from Pocketpair, an independent Japanese studio that most of you probably never heard of until the game launched. Though not the studio’s first game, Palworld certainly seems to be its biggest, offering an open world filled with survival mechanics, resource management, and over 100 not-Pokémon called Pals to capture and use in battle or put to work. So, how much money did it spend on making it?

How much did Palworld cost to develop?

According to a Jan. 16 blog post by Pocketpair CEO Takuro Mizobe, Palworld’s budget was about one billion yen. At the time of writing, that’s equivalent to roughly $6.78 million. That’s not a lot when you compare it to some of the biggest AAA titles in recent memory. Last year, Sony accidentally revealed its budgets for Horizon Forbidden West and The Last of Us Part 2, which were approximately $212 million and $220 million respectively (via IGN). That’s more than triple what it cost to make Palworld.

But $6.78 million is still a large sum for an obscure indie studio like Pocketpair. What’s even more shocking, though, is Pocketpair didn’t have a budget in mind when it started development. Mizobe admits the plan was to simply keep pumping money into the project until the “bank account reaches zero,” and then start borrowing money. Reading Mizobe’s comments is flabbergasting, and any would-be game developers reading this should probably avoid following Pocketpair’s example. Had Palworld crashed and burned upon launch, the studio could very well have been forced to close.

Fortunately for Pocketpair, its risks are paying off. Palworld sold one million copies in its first eight hours, and in just five days, that number has exceeded seven million—and that’s just on PC. For comparison’s sake, it took a major PlayStation 5 exclusive like Spider-Man 2 to hit five million sales in 11 days, and that had the advantage of starring one of the world’s most popular comic book superheroes.

While we lack Xbox sales figures (plus the game is available on Xbox Game Pass, which means some get to play it for free), the Steam sales alone also mean Palworld has made a profit. With six million copies sold and early access costing $26.99 (at a discount, mind; it’ll go up to $29.99 by the end of Jan. 26), that’s about $161,940,000 made just on PC, more than double Palworld’s budget. Still, with a roadmap of updates in the pipeline and a full launch, Pocketpair will need to keep pumping time and money into Palworld for a long while now.