Palworld tops 5M sales after shifting 86,000 copies per hour over the weekend

The game is in development since 3 years, it took nintendo <24h to DAMC a mod which changed pals to pokemons. The fact that they know about it but haven't taken any actions implies they don't expect to be able to take down the game, at most force it to remove a few specific pals.

> quiiiite similar to existing pokemons

A lot of Pokemons are quite generic if you ignore their fine details. Not just in later generations but from gen 1 one. Besides that paying homage to predecessors in art and games is pretty common.

> Why haven't Nintendo made a proper game like this themselves? Everyone has been wanting it for decades by now.

Nintendo mainly makes their Pokemon games for (quite) young people, Pokemons with guns you can enslave to do your work kinda don't fit in there ;=)

And "open world Pokemon catching with Pokemon openly running around" is something the did make with some of the recent games. (Through from what I have heart it wasn't that grate.) That they have to fit whatever they create to run on a switch is probably part of the issue, too. The switch is very slow and if you do something at the limit of an hardware platform you have to spend much more time backtracking because some grate idea is a bit to compute or graphic intensive and run into issues like micro-optimizations making code harder to maintain, debug and in turn change and fix bugs.

Some Pokemon are quiiiite similar to existing Digimon =)