Game designers hoping to work for Pocketpair – the developer behind Craftopia and Palworld – need to be voracious Steam gamers to even have their applications considered. Joining in on discussion among Japanese game developers on X, Pocketpair’s CEO Takuro Mizobe recently shared some tidbits about how the company hires new talent.
“At Pocketpair,” he writes on his personal X account, “we ask game designer candidates to submit screenshots of their playtime history on Steam. In fact, if you don’t play games on Steam at all, you won’t make it past the resume screening stage.”
According to Mizobe, apart from the fact that he wants to hire genuine, hardcore Steam gamers as staff, the purpose of this is also to test the candidates’ sensibilities as game designers (referred to as “game planners” in Japan). During interviews, applicants are asked to analyze the most played games in their libraries, which includes breaking down game mechanics and systems, explaining why certain design choices may have been made, and what distinguishes a specific title from other games in the same genre.
Mizobe adds that candidates with many hours on the PS5 or Xbox are, of course, encouraged to submit playtime screenshots from those platforms too. However, Steam seems to be the company’s number one priority. “If an applicant’s number of Steam games played is 0, we will, in principle, pass them on. We want our colleagues to be playing indie games that are only available on Steam,” he comments. This doesn’t come as a huge surprise, given Pocketpair’s roots as a small indie on Steam, as well as its subsequent evolution into a sizable developer and publishing label focusing on Steam.
Still, the practice is not exactly conventional, especially in terms of standard hiring procedures among Japanese developers. When we interviewed Mizobe at the dawn of Palworld’s massively popular launch, he told us that he and his small team arrived at the game’s design based on thorough experience playing other acclaimed titles in the same or similar genres – like Terraria, The Forest, Sons of the Forest, Conan Exiles, ARK: Survival Evolved, Minecraft, Valheim, Raft, Rust, Astroneer, Scrap Mechanic and Sunkenland. Seeing how well this approach worked out, it makes sense that Pocketpair wants its game designers to have varied (and substanial) Steam libraries.
Mizobe’s attitude towards new hires reminds me of past remarks by CyberConnect2’s CEO Matsuyama Hiroshi. While Matsuyama got some flack at the time for wording things a bit harshly (and focusing on the “owning every console out there” side of things), the idea that high and varied gaming input should be a pre-requisite for aspiring game developers seems to come from a similar way of thinking.
Speaking of Pocketpair, the developer is currently ramping up for Palworld’s much-awaited full release, which is planned to happen in 2026. The game’s recent teaser gives a sneak peek of what will be its biggest content update to date.
