Palworld

Palworld is the open-world survival and creature-collection game from the Japanese studio PocketpairPublisherPocketpairPocketpair is the Japanese independent studio behind Palworld, the record-breaking 2024 survival game. Palworld ships no kernel anti-cheat, since multiplayer is co-op on player-hosted servers, and its maker is the defendant in a patent-infringement suit brought by Nintendo and The Pokemon Company in 2024.1 game in this family →, released into Early Access on January 19, 2024 and built on UnrealEngineUnreal Engine (Epic Games)Epic Games' Unreal Engine is the most widely used engine in big-budget PC games. Versions 4 and 5 power a substantial share of the modern competitive shooter market, including Valorant (UE4), Fortnite (UE5), PUBG (UE4), The Finals (UE5), and Delta Force (UE5).20 games in this family → Engine 5. Players catch and command creatures called Pals to explore, build, and fight, a mix the press shorthanded as Pokemon with guns. Its launch was one of the biggest in Steam history: it peaked above 2.1 million concurrent players, second only to PUBG at the time, and sold around 12 million copies on Steam within two weeks. A 1.0 release is scheduled for July 2026.

Palworld asks almost nothing of your PC at the kernel level: no anti-cheat driver loads to play. Because protection is server-side, the integrity of a given multiplayer game depends on who runs the server, much like Minecraft; community projects exist to give dedicated-server admins their own server-side anti-cheat. The legitimate process is Palworld-Win64-Shipping.exe under the game's Win64 folder. If you play co-op with strangers and care about cheating, a well-administered dedicated server is the lever you have, not a client driver.

Palworld ships no kernel-mode client anti-cheat. There is no Easy Anti-Cheat or BattlEye driver loaded to play, because it is a cooperative survival game, not a competitive shooter, and multiplayer runs in small groups on player-hosted or dedicated servers. After early cheating on official servers, Pocketpair said it would add an external anti-cheat, but framed it as optional and oriented at official servers rather than a driver required on every player's machine. For most players the trust ask on your system is close to nothing at the kernel level, the opposite end of the spectrum from the kernel-anti-cheat shooters in this guide. The main Windows process is Palworld-Win64-Shipping.exe, the standard Unreal shipping-build name.

The defining story around Palworld's maker is legal. In September 2024, Nintendo and The Pokemon Company sued Pocketpair in Tokyo, and the important detail is what kind of suit it is: patent infringement, not copyright. The claims center on game-mechanic patents, such as capturing creatures by throwing a device and riding or switching between them, not on how the Pals look. Pocketpair has changed gameplay in response, replacing the throw-to-summon action and altering how players glide. As of mid-2026 the case is still active and has been narrowed to older versions of the game sold in Japan, with hearings scheduled later in the year; it is not settled, and reporting suggests the practical stakes have shrunk. The Verge, IGN, and GamesIndustry covered it.