Good news: Pocketpair knows and they are now in the licensing phase of the lifecycle
Palworld is a dormant game, much like Terraria, that will spur to life with content updates as it approaches completion.
It was a flash-in-the-pan meme game. Of course it’s “dead” in the popularity contest. Only the handful of actual dedicated fans still play it. The majority has moved on to the next meme fad craze/current popular title.
I think it has real staying power, if they can make the rest of the game as content rich as the first dozen or so hours. It’s only a flash in the pan because there’s not more fuel. As is the case for a lot of early access.
It seems to be a recurring problem with most, if not all, these survival crafting games. Which I find unfortunate, because the genre is fertile ground for actual new ideas and perfect for expansion.
The reason they all fail is because of lack of content for end game BUT they fail in that way because they refuse to learn from the titans. Why do you think minecraft and terraria have had such a long healthy life. It’s cause they have a robust modding community. They need to make the game around making it easy to mod for regular people. Look at minecraft skins, they’re easy to make and sites have easy tools to help make em so everyone dips their toes into it and creates unique custom content to add to the minecraft skin library.
Really good article discussing the unfortunate trend where
a lot more people are trying to push gamers to play games that aren’t really designed to be played for months on end.
-Buckley
Some other great quotes in there, the whole thing is worth a read.
whether a game is “dead” or not only really matters for online games with matchmaking. If a game requires a large playerbase to function, like an MMO or a matchmaking based competitive game, the game can die. This doesn’t apply to single player or small scale coop games.
Anyone will get the full single player game experience even if they are the only one playing. If the game has multiplayer, like coop or vs play where the expectation is that you will find the person who you will play with, the game cannot die.
Calling palworld a dead game is just as nonsensical as calling starfield dead because of a lower playercount. It literally doesn’t matter for this kind of game.
At most it matters to have a healthy player count to get quality guides/videos/forums, which don’t always matter, but are nice to have. Palworld still has a pretty good base for that though.
You dont need a big base for that, just a small one that likes to dig deep and document and talk about it.
I feel like snowrunner would be a good example but maybe thats too mainstream even.
I bought palworld.
i played it.
i enjoyed it.
i had enough.
i stopped.
there is nothing wrong with this sequence of events.You might play it again, depending on the updates it recieves.
TRUE! It’s nice to have the option!
I did that with No Man’s Sky and put another 20 hours into it
Only twenty?!?? Man I play NMS like I play Sims or Minecraft. I put 100hrs in, get bored and don’t play for a while, when I come back there’s been at least one or two updates and I’m easily able to put back in another hundred with new/revised content.
Not that it’s a competition, I’m just surprised cause of how much time I put into things. (x_x)
There are only a few games in my steam library where I have 100 or more hours.
That’s crazy. Not even counting time spent on pirated versions of games, any game that I truly enjoy has at least 300hrs logged. I think my most played game is sitting at a little over 1100hrs because fuuuck am I a sucker for a game dev that respects and engages their players, but that’s a different story to tell.
There are plenty of games that I loved that I only played for 30 or so hours. Hours aren’t everything
Since you like great games and devs that care, have you played The Legend of Zelda Breath of the Wild?
I mean just because I have 40-60 hours on games I like doesn’t mean I didn’t truly enjoy them. I played through the campaign and side quests and after a while life happened or I just got bored or played another game.
Checkout saleblazers now.
I’ve been eyeing that up since I’m a business management game kinda guy. But it depends on exactly how jank it is. Is it worth playing?
I did that, then started up a new playthrough to check out the updates. That’s a sign of a good game IMO
Did the exact same thing with Helldivers 2.
This whole “dead game” rhetoric seems to stem from the sane idea present in capitalism that something must be constantly growing.
People have bought Palworld, and they’ve made their money back and then some. And despite this not being a “live service” type game, it’s still receiving updates and still has active players.
Pretty sure Stardew Valley got more post launch content than many actual live service games…
All free because Concerned Ape is awesome.
People have bought Palworld, and they’ve made their money back and then some
Yes, but they didn’t sell themselves out to Microsoft or EA at their peak in order to hook into the Endless Invasive Advertisement Machine, so they’ll never be a true success story like Origin Systems, Westwood Studio, or Mythic Entertainment.
Bro? They literally signed with Sony.
Well, then they should be fine.
Seriously, and I still want to play it. Like every other games that seems continuous improvement, there will be an active and dedicated player base for it.
I hate these new trends of “Oh, that game came out last month, it’s too old now”.
I plan on playing again when it’s further fleshed out. It’ll be super fun.
People are calling it a dead game because it was a flavor of the month random meme game that happened to get wildly popular and was then left in the toy trunk after its novelty wore off.
When people are calling it ‘dead game’, they do not mean it in the older sense of either a server reliant multiplayer game that has no more players, or that its so old and buggy or incompatible with modern hardware and is not being developed any more, such that the game is unplayable.
They mean it in the sense of ‘i got bored of it and so did almost everyone else.’
Everyone heard ‘Pokemon with Guns!’, thought this was amusing, then played yet another open world survival crafting game with a gimmick.
multiplayer game that has no more players
‘i got bored of it and so did almost everyone else.’
Sounds like the same thing to me, unless you mean the servers would be down for the multiplayer game and nobody can play it anymore.
Palworld just released a massive update. It’s not dead. Just sounds like more bandwagon hate.
I just started playing it.
1.5 million concurrent players with a 99% drop off is STILL THOUSANDS OF CONCURRENT PLAYERS for an indie game.
The only games that can’t work with a playerbase in “only” 4 digits are MMOs. Otherwise there’s no excuse.
Same thing is said about Helldiver’s 2,and there were 60k online players in game last week on a weekday. That’s exceedingly healthy, especially when games run most of the infrastructure peer to peer anyways!
I hate the narrative, and I wish more games supported private servers for this same reason. There is no reason why a good game that failed to become the next Fortnite shouldn’t still enjoy a long life as a cult favorite for decades.
Is Ars Technica a dead publication asked the developer.
Im convinced the people saying Palworld is a dead game are dumbass pokemid fans angry theres not a content update every month.
Yet I check every now and then and the game still has like 30k players on steam! thats way better than a shitty live service disaster like Multiversus could ever hope for!
Strongly agree, palworld didn’t need to sustain hundreds of thousands of players for years. Not every game needs to be factorio. It did what it set out to.
I bought it, played it for a while, and moved on. nothings wrong.
Speaking of factorio, it is the example of “If you want your game to have true replay value, the best thing you can do is embrace the modding community”.
Factorio made mods first class citizens and reaped the rewards.
I thought the game was neat but far too buggy to enjoy.
I only play these kinds of games with others and after a few days the servers would always grind to a halt or the gameplay would spaz out.
I’m waiting until it’s done and I’ll try it again.
I typically do that with many survival games. I skipped Minecraft and Terraria during release and played it when it was at 1.0, and holy cow, they’re so deep!
When Valheim came out as early access and only 3 out of 6 biomes finished, reaching the end sucked. Because once you hit it, waiting a year or two for an update is painful.
Fortunately, it’s now a pretty oversaturated market. I was playing Vrising, Grounded, Raft, Dinkum, etc and just rotating between these early access games every few months.
