A small studio with three games in eternal early access. The usual.

Ok but hear me out. What about AAAA games?

The devs over there were able to create an engaging and fun game on a constrained budget, using a combination of various unity assets, in house design and modelling and a lot of attention to detail (especially with animations), which ran exceptionally well for an early access release.

An AAA studio with the same limitations applied would likely not have made anything close

If Palworld isn’t a AAA game. Then I don’t know what is