I’ll be honest: my first reaction to Palworld’s mobile game was that it could be a cheap copy nobody asked for. However, I was wrong. This one’s actually worth paying attention to for multiple reasons.

So what exactly is Palworld Online?

Pocketpair just confirmed a brand new mobile massively multiplayer online role-playing game, or MMORPG, called Palworld Online, and it is arriving on iOS and Android sometime later this year. But this isn’t the existing Krafton-made Palworld mobile title you might already know about.

Instead, Garena, a Singapore-based studio that has roughly 15 years of mobile development experience behind successful titles like Path of Exile, League of Legends, and EA Sports FC, is building this one (under an official license from Pocketpair). That is what makes it special.

The pitch here is quite ambitious, I’d say. The developers are trying to bring the scale and freedom of the original survival game to a phone screen without removing what made it work in the first place. You’ll still get creature collecting, crafting, and base building, plus co-op, PvP, and PvE multiplayer modes, which will be carried straight over from the PC version.

What’s actually new here, and when can you play it?

Rather than just shrinking the existing game, Garena says Palworld Online will bring a fresh setting, along with brand-new story content built specifically for mobile. It will include side stories you won’t find anywhere else.

Base management also gets reworked with simplified touch controls, which are better suited to smaller screens. Speaking about the reason for the partnership, Pocketpair CEO Takuro Mizobe pointed to Garena’s track record running live mobile games globally.

Even after all the exciting confirmations, we don’t have a firm release date yet. However, this game comes hot on the heels of Palworld’s massive 1.0 launch, along with the recently released Palworld card game. From what it looks like, Pocketpair clearly isn’t slowing down its expansion of this universe anytime soon.

If you ask me, handing mobile spinoffs to specialized studios like Garena, rather than building them in-house, has become the standard practise for PC and console games chasing global reach. It also lets Pocketpair keep its core development team focused on the main game’s live updates.