The Palworld Online mobile MMORPG is real, it is coming this year, and the company making it is not Pocketpair. Garena, the Singapore publisher behind Free Fire, says it has licensed the Palworld name and is building the game itself for iOS and Android.
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Garena announced it on Monday. There is no release date yet beyond 2026, and no word on price.
What the Palworld Online mobile MMORPG promises
The pitch is a shared open world rather than a phone port of the survival game. Garena describes “a living open-world ecosystem where you can meet, trade, and survive with others in real time while building a life alongside hundreds of unique Pals”. Both player versus player and player versus environment are in.
It will also carry the original Palworld story, plus side stories that exist only on mobile. So this is not a straight retelling.
Whether that survives contact with a phone is another question. Palworld on PC is a base-building game about automating labour, and if you have read our Palworld Work Suitability Guide you will know how much of it rests on assigning the right creature to the right job. That depth is hard to shrink onto a touchscreen without losing the point.
The line Garena chose to use
Now for the part that raised an eyebrow. Garena signs off its announcement by calling this “the most ambitious creature-collecting survival game on mobile”.
Creature-collecting. On mobile. That is a bold phrase to print, because creature-collecting on phones is Pokémon’s ground, and Pokémon’s owners have spent two years in court over this exact game.
Nintendo and The Pokémon Company sued Pocketpair in Japan in 2024, claiming Palworld infringed three patents covering monster-catching. The pair filed all three after Palworld came out. At first the pair asked the court to block the game entirely.
It has not gone the way that opening suggested.
Why the lawsuit no longer looks like a threat
Pocketpair changed the game instead of fighting over it. Most notably, it removed the ability to throw a Pal Sphere to summon a creature, which was the mechanic at the centre of the claim.
Nintendo and The Pokémon Company then narrowed what they were asking for. As reported in June, the case now covers only older versions of Palworld, and only sales inside Japan.
The legal analysis firm Gamesfray put a number on the best possible outcome. Even if Nintendo cleared every hurdle, it wrote, “the most it could get is JPY 5 million, the equivalent of $30K”. The court set presentation for 1 October, and expects opinions on 9 November.
Thirty thousand dollars. Against a game that has sold in the tens of millions and now has a full 1.0 release, a farming spin-off in development, a trading card game, and a joint venture with Sony Music Entertainment Japan behind it.
So the shape of the story has inverted. The lawsuit meant to stop Palworld is winding down towards a sum most studios would spend on a launch trailer, and in the same week Palworld announced it is walking onto phones. For a sense of how far the game has already travelled from its early jokes, our comparison with Monster Hunter Wilds covers where its combat actually stands. This breakdown of where the case ended up sets out the court timetable and the damages figures.
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