In no small way can anyone ever downplay the success of Pocketpair's Palworld. The game has went onto put the developer on the map, snatch the eyes of Sony to bring the game world into other mediums, and has even led to the studio expanding beyond just development. Yet, the game is still not complete, overall, their creature capture survival base builder ARPG is still in Early Access and while the studio has been pretty casual about updates and stuff -- it's been their whole thing, frankly -- the release of a 1.0 build isn't gonna be the case.
Pocketpair community manager and publishing lead, John "Bucky" Buckley, confirmed on social media that Palworld's 1.0 release date "isn’t going to be a sudden announcement on Discord." This was in a response to a fan who decried not wanting a notification from the server unless it was a release date.
Frankly, it makes total sense that Pocketpair isn't gonna just drop a short Discord post like "hey, 1.0's out." As said above, this game is kind of big for them, already poised to have other projects within that same world like Palworld: Palfarm, a farming sim that was eerily announced shortly after the announcement of Pokemon: Pokopia, but that's besides the point.
It's been said before the game's 1.0 is in the works, but they've refrained from confirming a release date so far. Of course, though, while it's not gonna be on Discord, we wouldn't be surprised if they're a touch casual on some other platform, like X or YouTube.
Speaking of that, if you aren't a player of their game, you probably know the Japanese dev for their ongoing legal trouble with Nintendo. Basically, Nintendo isn't a fan of Palworld, they segmented their patents and shortly after they were approved, the big N took Pocketpair to court. The latter here is still totally willing to face off against the bigger corp, as overall their game was totally fine to release. Since the suit started, the game hasn't slowed development down.
At this time, the game stands at over 21K players, which for an Early Access game released back in 2024, is pretty impressive.
Palworld, for those unfamiliar, is a creature capture survival ARPG where players use a mixture of captured Pals and their own firepower to survive a spawling island full of hostile mobs readily able to capture, evil gangs, and dangerous bosses. You can also collect resources and build up your own little slice of heaven complete with a whole industry motif.