Pocket Pair CEO Takuro Mizobe is seeing what having the shoe on the other foot feels like, as he has apparently taken notice of Auroria, an in-development survival sandbox from the Tencent-backed studio Tianjin Wumai Technology that he characterizes as a “clone game.”
Auroria is an upcoming cooperative sci-fi survivalbox for PC and mobile that sees players land on an uncharted planet where they must gather resources, build up a community, tame the wildlife, and “get helpers to increase productivity.” The game is set to release sometime in the second quarter of this year.
It’s those bean-like helpers that appear to have gotten Mizobe’s attention, as he says in his tweet that “various [Chinese] companies are simultaneously developing mobile clones of Palworld, and the budget scale is about 10 billion yen, 10 times that of Palworld.” Of course, Palworld itself has been accused of plagiarizing Pokemon — something that The Pokemon Company said it intended to investigate.
Addendum: While the original IGN article that noticed the tweet interpreted the translated tweet as an accusation, Mizobe has now said it wasn’t meant that way. “To ‘accuse’ someone of something, means to say they are doing something wrong,” he says (in English). “I don’t think what Tencent is doing is wrong. I’m proud that other companies want to make games like Palworld. The industry historically innovates when we borrow ideas from games we love. I’m surprised that many high-quality mobile games are already in development.” We’ve tweaked our headline in fairness. (Thanks Xanward!)
Meanwhile, Palworld has put forth another creature highlight reel that focuses on the Pal known as Foxcicle. It is a fox-shaped friend. It uses ice attacks. That’s the story there.
テンセントが早速パルワールドのクローンゲーム作ってる！
中国では各社が一斉にパルワールドのモバイル向けクローンを開発していて、しかも予算規模はパルワールドの10倍の100億円級・・・来年は原神クオリティのモンスター（または美少女）育成ゲームが大量にリリースされそう・・・
すごい時代 pic.twitter.com/RKqLz2RGOH
— Takuro Mizobe | Palworld (@urokuta_ja) April 16, 2024
