Characters from Palworld and Tales of Kenzera: Zau next to one another

Palworld Developer to Publish Horror Game by Tales of Kenzera: Zau Devs

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Published: January 23, 2025 9:15 AM

Palworld developer Pocketpair has revealed that it's opened a publishing wing, and that its first game will be a horror project by Tales of Kenzera: Zau developer Surgent Studios.

The partnership was announced earlier today in a post on social media platform X, wherein Pocketpair describes Surgent as "a studio with an original approach" and pledges to support the studio "to the fullest extent".

While this is Pocketpair's first publishing signing, it won't be the studio's last; the Palworld dev tells fans to "look forward to future announcements for details of specific projects", so we're going to be seeing more Pocketpair-published games in future.

A giant winged boss breathing blue fire at the player in Tales of Kenzera: Zau, whose developer, Surgent Studios, will have their next game published by Palworld developer Pocketpair
Palworld studio Pocketpair is stepping up to publish Tales of Kenzera: Zau developer Surgent's next game.

Over on the new Pocketpair Publishing website, the studio says its mission is "simple": to "find fun games" and then "help make those fun games a reality".

Pocketpair pledges not to tell indie developers "what to do", not to "take control" from them during the making of their games, and not to "change [their] dream or push [them] to make a certain type of game".

Instead, the studio simply wants to "give [developers] money" and "help [them] make a fun game". That sounds nice and simple to me, although it's notable that Pocketpair doesn't disclose the share it'll take of developers' revenue or other terms along those lines.

As for the next Surgent project, studio head Abubakar Salim says that it won't be set in the Tales of Kenzera: Zau universe and that it will be based around "a pattern in the entertainment industry". It'll also be "short and weird", according to Salim.

The player aiming a rocket launcher with a penguin-like Pal in it at another Pal in Palworld
We'll likely see more Pocketpair Publishing projects in the future.

This is a nice redemption story for Surgent Studios; back in October, the company put its team "on notice for redundancy" following the underperformance of the game (although we now know it's not the only EA-published game to have underperformed in recent months).

We'll likely have to wait a little while to see what Surgent's next project looks like, and we don't know whether Pocketpair will indeed be publishing more games in the Tales of Kenzera universe, but for now, it looks like Surgent has been granted a reprieve. Stay tuned for more.

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Joe has been writing for TechRaptor for several years, and in those years has learned a lot about the gaming industry and its foibles. He’s originally an… More about Joseph