Palworld continues to break records on Steam, racking up 1,864,421 unique concurrent players in the past 24 hours. At least 4 of those uniques are in the Nexus Mods offices, where after-hours ‘research’ is being conducted.
Whether you think this game has arrived out of the blue, or was an obvious hit, one thing is clear; It bears a lot of similarity to an existing game franchise you may have encountered, namely Pokémon. We won’t go into detail about potential similarities; suffice to say that enough significant likeness exists in the base games to require clarification when it comes to modding the game.
We do think that adding Pokémon content to Palworld is a very cool idea and we understand why people would want such a thing. However, we’re not comfortable hosting this content at Nexus Mods.
As you may know, Nintendo (who jointly own the Pokémon franchise) have a consistent record of mercilessly submitting legal challenges, DMCAs and takedowns against fan-made content.
Given Palworld’s similarity to the Pokémon franchise as a base game, hosting content that adds Pokémon copyrighted characters or assets into the game is almost certainly going to put us at risk of legal action. Palworld content that is uploaded to Nexus Mods and is considered to have Pokémon-derived characters or assets will be taken down. Our normal moderation policies will apply.
We don’t think it’s worth the risk to allow this content to be shared in our community. At best we would have to deal with the headache of legal threats from Nintendo and at worst they may seek to take action against us and the uploaders of the mods directly.
There are many creative opportunities to explore mods for this game that add to the world and gameplay, but do not infringe on existing IP so obviously. You are encouraged to explore these modding directions freely.
We are looking to support Palworld modding in any way that we can and we have already released Vortex mod manager support for Palworld. We also encourage you to visit us in our Palworld modding forums.
All of us here at Nexus Mods are really excited to see what the PalWorld modding community comes up with.
Wouldn’t a mod like that risk the game being taken down due to copyright infringement or something similar? As I understood it, using Pokemon in a mod isn’t bad in and of itself, but because of the combination with a “Pokemon-derivative” game it would be problematic to host the mods
The game does not host mods nor has any control over what users do to their game.
Why would community made content have any impact on the game?
Usually these cosmetic mods only work for yourself. You modify your client files to replace certain models and textures. Only for your client. No one else would notice you’re running mods and everything would be perfectly normal for everyone else. And unless DRM is a thing in this game, not even the devs would notice.
Devs can demand to take down mods, they could also kill all mods for good if they wish. They are not being affected by copyright at all. Not even with their original game. Is not a clone of a Nintendo game, their aren’t using their licenced characters or assets. Not even their game modes are similar.