Pal World's Japanese Innovation

A story about how a Japanese game developer created one of the most successful games on Steam (Pal World) with an unconventional approach and minimal budget.

"The founder wrote this amazing blog post where he explains everything. He's kind of a shithead in the best possible way. He basically says 'This game shouldn't even exist. It's the antithesis of proper game development.'

He had no budget - no sane company would ever start developing a game without a budget, but PocketPair is not a sane company. He started asking himself what's the budget, and when the balance of their bank account reached zero, they could always just borrow money or release money just before the company went bankrupt. They had about 2 years of runway, and he decided to keep working without stressing about budget because all he was worried about was getting the game done as fast as possible.

He made some money in crypto and then took the crypto money to start a game studio, even though he wasn't equipped to do that. One of his developers is a guy he met at a convenience store, a teenager who told him he could code. There was this one lady who applied but he didn't think her designs were good so he rejected her, but then 3 months later she sent him a DM. He was so amazed that she was bold enough after being rejected to keep messaging him, so they hired her.

Now it's the number one game on Steam with over 1 million people concurrently playing the game - more than Dota, more than Counter Strike, more than PUBG. In just 7 days, it has done $200 million in revenue, and it was made on a $10,000 budget."