Palworld Online is a Palworld MMO built for phones, made by Garena under license from Pocketpair, and it’s supposed to be out this year. That sentence contains most of what anyone has actually confirmed since the game was announced at the start of the month.
The rest is a mix of reasonable guesses and a genuine mix-up with a completely different Palworld phone game that a completely different company is making. So here’s the whole picture, question by question, with the unknowns left as unknowns.
What is Palworld Online?
A licensed spin-off, not a port. Garena, the Singapore company behind Free Fire, is developing and publishing it, with Pocketpair licensing the IP. The announcement calls it a “new multiplayer survival adventure,” and the important word is new: it has its own narrative setting, its own story, and side stories written only for this version. You still catch Pals, still build a base, still put Pals to work automating the boring parts. You just do it in a persistent world with other people in it.
Hang on, isn’t there already a Palworld game for phones?
There is, and this isn’t it. This is the part everyone is getting tangled in, and it’s not the readers’ fault.
Krafton, the PUBG company, signed its own Palworld mobile license with Pocketpair back on October 2, 2024, with PUBG Studios developing. That game is called Palworld Mobile. Two separate games, two separate companies, two separate licenses off one IP, both currently pointed at the same year. Which is less bizarre once you’ve seen how much of Palworld is licensed out rather than built in-house.
The other one is further along, too. Palworld Mobile was playable on the show floor at G-Star in Busan last November and ran a closed alpha at the end of 2025. Palworld Online hasn’t had a test of any kind. So the Palworld phone game people have actually held is the one Garena didn’t announce.
When does Palworld Online come out?
2026. That’s the whole answer, and it’s Garena’s whole answer too: “scheduled to be available in 2026,” with the launch timeline “unveiled at a later date.” No month, no quarter, no window narrower than the calendar year. Four and a bit months of it are left.
What phones will it run on?
Almost certainly iPhone and Android, and we’d be surprised by anything else — but Garena hasn’t said so. The announcement never uses either word. It says mobile, handheld devices, and a “wide range of phone specifications.” Gematsu put iOS and Android in its headline and most outlets followed. It’s a safe bet rather than a confirmed spec, and there’s no store listing anywhere to check it against.
Can I play it where I live?
Nobody knows, and this is the biggest open question of the lot.
Garena’s announcement doesn’t name a single country, region or territory. The word “worldwide” turns up once in the entire release and it’s inside a quote from Pocketpair CEO Takuro Mizobe, not in anything Garena says about its own launch plans.
Worth knowing which way Garena usually leans: its other big licensed title this year, Monster Hunter Outlanders, opened pre-registration in Southeast Asia and nowhere else, back in July. That’s a pattern, not a promise, but if you’re outside Southeast Asia, it’s the reason to hold off on any assumptions.
How is it different from Palworld on PC?
The world doesn’t stop being there when you log off, and other people are in it. You meet players out in the open world, form groups, and build shared settlements instead of your own private base. There’s co-op PvE, and there are PvP matches. Garena mentions “rampaging bosses” roaming the map that take a group to bring down, and rare Pals to hunt together.
On the handling side: a touch interface with optional one-tap controls, aimed at making base building and Pal deployment survive the move to a screen you hold in one hand.
Do my Pals or my save carry over?
Nothing has been said. Different developer, different license, different game. Assume no until somebody says otherwise, and don’t let anyone tell you it’s confirmed either way.
Is it free-to-play?
Not announced. There’s no business model in the release at all — no price, no subscription, no mention of a store.
For what it’s worth, Garena’s business is free-to-play live-service games and Free Fire is one of the biggest of them. That’s a strong hint about which direction this goes. It is still a hint.
Can I pre-register yet?
No. There’s no pre-registration, no beta sign-up and no waiting list. Garena pointed at the game’s Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, Discord and Reddit as where that will appear, which is the only reason to follow any of them right now.
Is that a new Pal in the announcement art?
There’s definitely something. Top right of the key visual, floating just above the rider’s raised hand, there’s a small white-and-cyan creature with feline ears, mint-green markings and oversized green eyes, trailing a ribbon that breaks apart into cyan cubes and scatters. That dissolving-into-data look is unlike anything in the base game’s roster, and it’s the detail most of the coverage has skipped past.
Players have started calling it Baby Lunaris. That name is a fan invention. Vice spotted the creature first and was careful to say so. Nobody official has named it, said whether you can catch it, said whether it’s a Pal at all rather than a story character, or said whether it ever shows up in the PC game.
What has Pocketpair said about any of this?
Remarkably little. Their own newsroom hasn’t posted about Palworld Online, or about Krafton’s game for that matter, in either the English or Japanese version. The newest item there is from May. Every word we have on this game still comes from Garena.
When will we know more?
Pre-registration opening is the next real signal, and it’s the one that answers the territory question by default: the moment a sign-up page names countries, we’ll know where this is actually launching. A trailer with gameplay in it would be the other thing worth waiting for, since everything above is still built on one press release and one piece of key art.
Four months of 2026 to go. We’ll update this as Garena fills the gaps in.