Palworld Maker Launches Publishing Label With One Big Rule: No AI-First Games

Palworld studio Pocketpair just launched a publishing label, and before the floodgates open with pitches powered by chatbots and crypto schemes, they set a pretty blunt ground rule: not interested.

New label, old-school approach

Pocketpair Publishing is the new division spun up by the team behind Palworld, and its head, John Buckley, is drawing a bright line. In an interview, he said the company does not want to publish games built on generative AI or tied to blockchain buzzwords.

"We dont believe in it... If youre big on AI stuff or your game is Web3 or uses NFTs... were not the right partner."

To be super clear, here is what they are steering clear of:

• AI-generated games
• Web3 projects
• NFT integrations

The wave he sees coming

Buckley is not pretending AI in games is going away. He expects the next two to three years to be messy, especially on Steam: a surge of ultra-low-effort, AI-assembled releases. He points out other storefronts have already been swamped by this stuff; Steam had kept a lid on it for a while, but that is changing.

His prediction for how players respond is interesting: a swing toward what he calls an authenticity market, where audiences seek out developers who are clearly building something with care, not shoveling out autogenerated filler.

About those Palworld accusations

This is where things get a bit awkward. Palworld was accused at launch of using generative AI for its creature designs. Pocketpair has repeatedly denied that. More recently, the studio caught flak for supposedly running the game’s localization through machine translation. Buckley says arguing about it publicly only adds oxygen to bad-faith pile-ons, but he did clarify one point that was held up as proof.

Their credits did not list individual translators, which critics took as a smoking gun for AI. Buckley’s explanation: in Japan, it is common for credits to list the localization company rather than name every person involved. He is not defending the practice as ideal — he actually called it unfortunate — just explaining why the credits looked the way they did.

Zooming out: AI games are already here

Whether you love or hate it, AI-built games are not theoretical anymore. Right now, most of them are easy to spot; that will get harder as the tools improve. The obvious hope is that storefronts start labeling this stuff clearly so players can tell what they are buying and filter accordingly. At minimum, it would help separate rushed, synthetic content from the legitimately human-made work Buckley is talking about.

Elsewhere in dev-land: a more nuanced take

Over on Arc Raiders, one of the leads said games cannot be built by an AI — and he hopes they never can — but also admitted he wants teams to create content a hundred times faster, and AI might help with that part. That is the tension the industry is wrestling with: blunt refusals to publish AI-generated games on one side, and on the other, developers who want smarter tools without letting the tools take the wheel.