“We’re going to see more hit games coming from publishers you’ve never heard of” – Pocketpair and the indie publishing revolution

John Buckley, head of publishing and communications at Palworld creator Pocketpair, says that big publishers need to get with the times. “The terms they offer and the way they structure their deals have increasingly become irrelevant to what the industry is today.”

He’s speaking to GamesIndustry.biz at Bitsummit 2026, where the firm is presenting the first wave of titles from Pocketpair Publishing, established at the start of 2025. After raking in millions from the surprise mega-hit Palworld, the company has gone on a mission to shake things up in the world of publishing.

“No one wants to sign 100% recoup revenue clauses until publishers break even anymore,” says Buckley, echoing the thoughts of Hooded Horse CEO Tim Bender. “That’s gaming ten years ago, it’s just that some of the legacy publishers have brand recognition and the luxury to turn developers down, since their name recognition will still leave someone willing to sign for them.”

“It’s why I think a lot more indie developers with success are starting to think, hey, we can do this ourselves! We’ll publish, and we’ll offer more favourable terms, and we won’t do recoup clauses. A lot more companies are doing it, because it’s a lot more sustainable than people realize.”

Pocketpair is part of a new wave of indie publishing houses established by studios with indie mega-hits under their belt, like Outersloth, Evil Landfall, Ghost Ship Publishing, and Kinetic Publishing, to name a few. Buckley feels like these creator-led initiatives, along with alternative funding sources, represent the future.

“I think we’re going to see more hit games coming from publishers you’ve never heard of, more indie games getting funding through incubators and public funds, rather than publishers. The future of the modern publisher is just a marketing agency, offering platform support but not necessarily developer support. Massive legacy publishers may move towards AA-scale titles, but for others, this is where it’s going.”

Genesis

Pocketpair never expected Palworld to be the success that it was. Soon after launch in January 2024, the game soared past 2 million concurrent players on Steam, and one year later Pocketpair celebrated reaching more than 32 million players across all platforms.

Immediately after the launch, everyone from media to merchandising companies was getting in touch. But what surprised the company was other developers asking for funding.

“We were confused at first,” recalls Buckley. “We’re a Japanese company, and the Japanese industry is very insular, so we were ignorant to what goes on internationally in terms of publishing. We didn’t know what was going on, so we took a few meetings mostly out of interest. We heard people were struggling to find funding and visibility, and since financially we were able to help, it all started from there.”

The first game Pocketpair Publishing signed was Dead Take from Surgent Studios, which only months earlier had put its entire games team on hiatus due to lack of funding.

Now, the publisher’s catalogue has grown to seven currently announced titles, including the Bitsummit 2024 best game winner Cassette Boy and the Metroidvania roguelike Never Grave. But Windrose from Kraken Express has been by far the most successful title to date, reaching one million units sold within its first week, with a peak concurrent player count of over 222,000, according to SteamDB.

Like Palworld, Windrose is a survival crafting game. Initially, Pocketpair thought about being “the survival crafting publisher guys,” admits Buckley, before deciding to broaden the horizons for potential signings. But Windrose seemed like a “natural fit” for the publisher. “Our own audience loves those games, so it was very easy to activate those players.”

The Windrose developers hail from Uzbekistan, and Buckley says this is a sign of gaming’s borderless future, where innovative titles can emerge from anywhere. “Truckful was the second game we signed, and they’re from Poland. You have a team from Uzbekistan here. There’s been language barriers sometimes, time zone barriers, hurdles with tech and government funding, so there’s nuance to the challenges that come with publishing internationally. Especially as a Japanese studio with tax laws!”

“But with the barriers of development starting to disappear, only physical events still maintain the idea of what gaming is for any region. Everything is changing, and this shows that.”

The deal

Outersloth revealed the details of its standard contract at GDC this year, but so far Pocketpair hasn’t publicly disclosed its publishing terms. Buckley says this is because the contract varies depending on how much support the publisher will be required to offer, although he notes that generally, the deal involves around a 30–40% recoup rate, without Pocketpair taking ownership of the IP, alongside clauses such as the ability to part ways amicably if the partnership isn’t working.

The support provided by Pocketpair varies from game to game, in line with the modern shift towards pick and mix publishing. The company will work with developers on marketing as much or as little as the creators wish; typically, the team will take charge of Asian and Japanese promotion, thanks to their experience and knowledge in these markets.

In the case of Truckful, Pocketpair handled global marketing, whereas for Windrose, the promotion was handled by the developers outside of Japan. Pocketpair also offers in-house localization and QA for Japanese and Chinese. “We’re still more hands-off than probably 99% of publishers,” Buckley says.

Meanwhile, outside of publishing, Pocketpair is continuing to develop its own games. The company has grown from 30–35 people at the launch of Palworld to around 110–120 people today, and Buckley says that small teams tend to split off to experiment on smaller projects, with hiring for these teams “ramping up in recent months.”

“We’ve always had a more experimental and incubation-style culture for games development at the studio,” he says. “We like to make little ideas, try them out, see if they work or they don’t work, and that’s how we make games. Then we move onto something new.”

But of course, there’s no ignoring the behemoth that Palworld has become. The game is set for its 1.0 launch on July 10, and while Pocketpair doesn’t foresee it receiving No Man’s Sky-style large-scale overhauls or long-term major support now the initial roadmap is complete, 1.0 won’t be the end of support for the title, either.

Nor will it be the end of the series. Spin-off titles have been planned, like Palworld: Palfarm, alongside a card game from Japanese manufacturer Bushiroad. In 2024, a partnership with Aniplex and Sony Music was announced with multimedia ambitions, although no updates have yet been shared for the content to be produced through this initiative.

“We always intended to create Palworld and develop it for a while, but the idea that Palworld would become this IP that we would be making spin-offs for, that all came post-launch,” says Buckley. “We had to, though. We’d be fools to put this game aside, wouldn’t we? So we should at least try and continue it.”

Legal battles

Still, all these grand ambitions rest under the cloud of the ongoing legal battles the company has faced with Nintendo over alleged patent violations. Nintendo sued Pocketpair in September 2024, a case that is still ongoing. Then, in September 2025, Nintendo filed a new patent on in-game characters summoning others to battle, which was later rejected by the US Patent Office. The Japanese Patent Office also denied a patent application for the mechanic of capturing a character or creature in a game, which was filed by Nintendo in March 2024.

As a result of the disputes, Pocketpair removed the ability to summon creatures by throwing Pokéball-style Pal Spheres in December 2024, as well as ditching Pal-gliding in May 2025.

Buckley says that the ongoing legal battles have taken their toll. “It impacted morale, for sure,” he explains. “Last year, we publicly stated that we had to change two features in the game due to the ongoing litigation. Unfortunately, it is still very much ongoing. It obviously has an impact on development.

“There’s two facets to this. There’s obviously the actual litigation, and then there’s kind of the court of public opinion, and these are two very different things. More than anything, this started in September 2024, so it’s been a year and half now, and most of us are just getting on with our work.”

Despite the pressure, Pocketpair remains defiant. “We’re making the game we like to make, and our players love that. Survival crafting is our genre, and we’re going to keep making the game we love.”