The hit 2024 survival crafting sim Palworld is conspicuously absent from the Nintendo eShop amid an ongoing battle with Nintendo, which has accused the game of violating its patents. The same can’t be said for Palland, a cheap knock-off that Nintendo seemed to have no problem approving for sale on the Switch eShop earlier this summer.
Glance at the store listing for Palland (via NintendoSoup) and you’ll instantly clock it as a Palworld clone. Like much of the knock-off slop that crowds digital storefronts, it’s a simplified version of an existing game that mimics the art style and marketing more than the actual gameplay. Published on July 31 by BoggySoft, the $10 game bills itself as a base-building survival sim in which you harvest resources and kill stuff. What it doesn’t mention is anything about collecting creatures that look strikingly similar to certain Pokémon.
“Palland delivers a rich and immersive experience where base-building, combat, exploration, and evolution blend into one dynamic and strategic journey,” reads the description. Gameplay footage uploaded by various people on YouTube shows the reality: an avatar who looks straight out of Palworld running around boring fields fighting cute creatures with incredibly low-budget animations.
What Palland is missing that got Palworld in trouble are Pokémon mechanics like getting creatures to low-health, aiming not-Poké-Balls at them to capture them, and later being able to ride on their backs. Those are the gameplay loops Nintendo said Palworld maker Pocketpair violated its patents for, leading to a lawsuit filed last year. As reported by Game File, Pocketpair has been implementing a series of tweaks beginning last November to each of these mechanics to address Nintendo’s legal complaints, although it remains for the court to decide if the updates go far enough.
While Nintendo might not have a problem with Palland since its creatures aren’t obvious knock-offs of Pokémon and it isn’t selling tens of millions of copies, the proliferation of games like Palland is a clear problem for developers on storefronts like the eShop. In addition to lots of other generic AI slop, it’s now common to see console storefronts quickly fill up with knockoffs of Steam games after they blow up in popularity on PC. PSN is already chock full of Peak clones.
That was part of the irony of Sony suing Tencent over its obvious Horizon Zero Dawn ripoff. While the publisher is quick to deal with rival companies allegedly infringing on its IP, small studios and solo devs are left to scream into the customer service void to try and get cheap cash-grab clones of their work policed on the PlayStation Store. You’ve heard of the 2025 Steam sensation Schedule I, but can I interest you in some Trippy Trader : Schedule & Sell? Unlike Schedule I, it’ll be available on PS4 later this month
