Garena announced Palworld Online this week, an officially licensed mobile MMO built on Pocketpair’s Palworld IP. The Singapore based company is developing and publishing it, with a release planned for iOS and Android sometime in 2026.
The pitch is Palworld’s core loop stretched across a persistent shared world. You still catch Pals, still build a base, still assign Pals to automate production and defend the place. What changes is that everyone else is in there with you. Garena is promising parties, shared settlements, open world bosses that take a group to bring down, and structured PvP. There’s also an original story written for this version plus side content that won’t appear in the PC game, so returning players get something genuinely new rather than a replay of what they already finished.
Terry Zhao, Garena’s president, said the goal is preserving the depth and freedom of the original while making it comfortable to play on a phone. Pocketpair CEO Takuro Mizobe pointed to Garena’s track record in global publishing, localization and live operations, which is exactly the skill set an MMO needs if it’s going to still be running in five years.
Two mobile projects, two different games
Krafton signed its own licensing agreement with Pocketpair back in October 2024 to build a Palworld mobile game through PUBG Studios. That’s a separate project from this one, so there are now two mobile Palworld titles in development at two different companies.
That sounds confusing at first, but it points to something good. Krafton’s deal was described as reinterpreting the original game for phones. Garena’s is an MMO with its own story and a shared persistent world. Those are two different games for two different moods, and if both land, mobile players get options instead of one compromise version. That’s speculation on my part, but it’s the reading that makes both deals fit together.
It also fits the pace Pocketpair has been keeping. The Sony Music joint venture, the Bushiroad card game that just launched, Palfarm on the way, and now this. The IP is expanding in about every direction at once, and each of those is a different door into the same world.
What to expect next with Palworld Online
Base building is the piece I’m most curious about. Palworld bases are big and sprawling and personal, and fitting that into a persistent world is a real design puzzle. Garena specifically said shared settlements, which sounds like something closer to a group hub. A base you build and automate with friends, defended by Pals you all caught, could end up being the best part of the whole thing.
The automation loop also suits a phone better than most people expect. Assigning Pals to run production while you’re away from the game is already how Palworld works, and that translates cleanly to something you check between other things during the day.
There’s still five months left in 2026, and Garena says details on timing, testing and registration are coming through official channels. A regional rollout ahead of a wider launch would follow the pattern Garena usually runs in Southeast Asia, so keep an eye out for pre registration opening in waves.