, Pocketpair CEO Takuro Mizobe was asked about the future of open world creature-collector Palworld, and whether it would make sense to transition to a live-service model.
He also mentioned the difficulty of taking a paid game and making it free-to-play—as many successful live-service games are—without alienating its existing audience."It is common for live-service games to be F2P with paid elements such as skins and battle passes," he said,"but Palworld is a B2P game, so it's difficult to turn it into a live-service game from the ground up."
If that reads to you like someone who entertained the possibility of transitioning Palworld to a free-to-play service game and decided against it for the time being, congratulations on your reading comprehension skills. Some Palworld players, however, thought the opposite, and took to social media to complain about the game they loved becoming a dreaded game-as-a-service..
Pocketpair seems to have been thinking a lot about ways to build on the success of Palworld. As the original interview notes, another plan the studio considered was running in-game ads, though that was wisely ditched given how players on PC would react to it. As Mizobe said,"Steam users hate ads."