Palworld Redraws Its Most Blatant Pokémon Lookalikes for 1.0

Palworld has left early access with a 1.0 patch that drew hundreds of thousands of new and returning players, and Pocketpair used the same update to quietly redraw several of its creatures. The long changelog said nothing about the visual reworks, but players quickly flagged them: fixes to a handful of Pals that had leaned hardest on existing Pokémon designs.

At launch, those designs drew ridicule. Some Pals were not loose homages but near-assemblies of recognizable Pokémon silhouettes, limbs, and details, often carried over without a change to the color palette.

The 1.0 versions pull back from that. Verdash, long cited as a Cinderace lookalike, now has less humanoid proportions and has dropped the legwear that matched its counterpart. Robinquill and Fenglope no longer use the palettes of Decidueye and Cobalion, and both received detail changes meant to separate them from their doppelgangers. Players tracked the edits on Reddit rather than in any official notes.

Pocketpair made none of this loud. I read the timing as the point, since the studio reworked the designs only after the game had made its millions. PC Gamer's Lincoln Carpenter framed the reworks as a tacit admission that the original creatures were not a model of creative integrity, fixable once the money was already in.

The redesigns sit apart from the legal fight. Nintendo and The Pokémon Company sued Pocketpair in Japan in September 2024 over patents covering the throw used to catch a creature and the act of riding one, not over how any Pal looks. I think that distinction is worth holding onto, because the visual changes answer a reputational charge rather than a courtroom one. Pocketpair had already altered the disputed mechanics, pulling the Pal Sphere and reworking gliding in a December 2024 update so players needed an actual glider. Carpenter noted the reworks could be read as part of an undisclosed settlement but saw no reason to assume one, given the doubt now hanging over the patents.

That doubt has deepened on more than one front. In November 2025, Nintendo and Pokémon narrowed their claims to older builds of Palworld, the versions that existed before the mechanics were patched out. IP analyst Florian Mueller, a former Blizzard employee, put the maximum recovery at about 5 million yen, roughly $30,000, against an opening demand PC Gamer reported near $66,000.

"This litigation is no longer about anything serious in commercial terms."

— Florian Mueller

Both the Japan Patent Office and the US Patent and Trademark Office have grown skeptical of Nintendo's game-rule applications, and videogame patent lawyer Kirk Sigmon said its newest Pokémon-related patents should never have been granted. Nintendo's most recent annual report logged a $40 million loss from patent litigation. The court will hear evidence on October 1 and give its opinion on November 9, 2026.

None of it has slowed Pocketpair. Palworld took four Steam medals at Steam's Best of 2025 Awards, winning silver for Most Played and Most Played on Steam Deck and bronze for Top Seller and best Controller game, with Hollow Knight: Silksong taking the top prize. The studio marked the result on X and pointed to the 1.0 launch it was already building toward. Communications director Bucky answered the years of write-offs directly.

"Two years later and we're still humbled by our community's endless support and kindness. Thank you so, so, so much, Palworld games. Not bad for a dead game!!"

— Bucky

The game still draws around 85,000 concurrent Steam players and climbs to between 140,000 and 212,000 during major updates, a range that puts it near CS2, Dota 2, and GTA V, after it peaked at nearly 2.1 million at its early 2024 launch.

Pocketpair has treated collaborations as routine while the case runs. The Palworld X ULTRAKILL Crossover arrived on December 17, 2025, the game's second major team-up after Terraria, bringing in the shooter's weapons, its coin-parry move, and playable versions of V.1 and V.2, and its trailer closed on a shadowed silhouette fans linked to the long-teased Colossal Whale.

KRAFTON ran the first Palworld Mobile alpha test in the fourth quarter of 2025, with a public debut at G-STAR 2025 and development led by PUBG Studios under licensing rights it secured in 2024.

Read also, Pocketpair turned last year's April Fool's gag into a real project: More Than Just Pals, a Palworld dating sim now in development and wishlistable on Steam, with a trailer dropped a day before April Fool's and a competition to win a Lovander body pillow.