Palworld blew up big in 2024, becoming only the second game in Steam history to hit more than 2 million concurrent players (along with PUBG and, later that same year, Black Myth: Wukong). That kind of success put a big target on developer Pocketpair, drawing fraudulent claims of AI use and plagiarism, heaps of abuse from gamers, and a patent lawsuit from Nintendo.
That's not the only type of attention the open world creature-collecting game got, though.
