Palworld developer Pocketpair is pouring nearly a half-million dollars every month into keeping the game’s servers up, which it can afford to do because Palworld is a massive hit. But it still needs help in the form of people, and rather like Gary Oldman in Leon, it’s looking for all the help it can get.

“At Palworld, we still have a lot to do, but we are overwhelmingly short of people to join us!” the studio tweeted on its Japanese account (translated by DeepL). “We are looking for people for all positions, but we are especially looking for planning and engineers!

“We are looking for people with experience in any type of engine, so if you are interested in creating a completely new type of game, please apply!”

The Twitter auto-translation is a little more Palworld-esque: “We are severely lacking in friends!”

It’s not the worst problem in the world to have, but it is a problem. Palworld is a massive success, surpassing 19 million players across Steam and Xbox on January 31, less than two weeks after it launched, and I have to assume that number has grown since then. Its concurrent player count on Steam has tailed off from those heady days, but Palworld is still one of the most-played games on Steam, currently being outpaced only by the perennial number-one Counter-Strike 2. That’s hundreds of thousands of people playing at any given moment, and that’s a lot to manage.

Pocketpair is a Japanese studio, so while they may not care what engine you know, I would imagine that fluency in the language (and probably residency in the country) would be a big plus. 

The good news for prospective candidates is that working at Pocketpair is not like working in Palworld: The studio’s English-language website promises flexible hours, comprehensive benefits, and “basically non-existent” overtime, and says, without a hint of irony, “the era of making games while suffering is over.” If only the poor Pals were given such consideration.