Is Palworld a “dead game”? Who cares, says the game’s developer
Is Palworld a “dead game”? Who cares, says the game’s developer
Maybe, just maybe, players want more new ideas rather than live services.
I bought palworld.
i played it.
i enjoyed it.
i had enough.
i stopped.
there is nothing wrong with this sequence of events.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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
I haven't bought it myself yet. When Palworld was all the hype on my discord server I noticed it still was incredibly jank. Clipping, pathing, physics, AI, those sorts of things.
If the issues get polished I'll probably buy it. But the devs seem to be doing quite well so far.
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.
Checked SteamDB, it says the online players are between 20k and 50k, and it's summer (meaning everyone is out and about).
How does one take these numbers and proclaim a game dead? It's like 30th in the overall Steam Chart for number of online players.
Line must go up. If line doesn't go up, it's dead. It can't go down, and it can't level off, either.
It's an unhealthy approach to anything. Things will level off eventually. Palworld's initial hype was never going to last, but if it settled into a nice plateau that let the devs pay their bills, that's fine. The giants of the industry consider such a thing to be failure, but fuck them. Players shouldn't buy into that mindset.
I think a lot of people are preoccupied with the optics of not being HUGE and receiving frequent updates or losing a lot of players. Especially people who grew up with games that didn't really have a lot of competition for their time or were decent jumps over their competitors. Halo 2 came out, and EVERYONE was playing. There wasn't any real competitor. Nowadays, survival crafters are a dime-a-doze.
Halflife is a dead game. Portal is a dead game.
Don't expect every game to be Minecraft.
Dead? Really? Cuz Portal and Minecraft are my kids' top two games!
I think they mostly mean dead as in not many people playing them consistently, but that's of course due to the fact that they are quite old and don't have a ton of replayability. (In regards to portal and half-life.)
Though I'd also argue that they are far from dead in spirit, as they are still very well regarded and thought of, and still talked about quite a bit. And there is of course always new people discovering or playing them since they are such classics.
Minecraft is still of course alive and well, for me personally it is my single most played game, and I still play it from time to time, albeit primary modded.
What about L4D2? They still have servers running
servers running ≠ alive
Palworld is a dormant game, much like Terraria, that will spur to life with content updates as it approaches completion.
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.
Palworld just released a massive update. It's not dead. Just sounds like more bandwagon hate.
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!
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.
Basically yes, the last part of what you said:
A game that basically cannot be played without the existence of servers which are typically too complex or too expensive or outright banned from an average user with a decent internet connection acting as the server, that is a game that is 'truly dead', a game that is not really playable in single player whose multiplayer infrastructure no longer exists.
You can host a few people on your own minecraft or valheim or palworld server, or you can play the whole game single player, and the vast majority of gameplay systems and experiences work in single player.
Compared to say an MMO whose servers are just down, a live service game whose live service is now discontinued, a massive multiplayer fps that just no longer has any dedicated servers, etc.
Palworld is still a playable game getting updates from the devs and its multiplayer capacity still works.
It just is no longer wildly popular, which is again due to its nature of being yet another flavor of the week or month for twitch, yet another open world survival craft game with a goofy gimmick.
It is only dead in the sense of the collective zeitgeist moving on to something else once they got bored of it.
Popular gaming lingo does conflation or concepts with totally different meanings all of the time.
We've got 'dead' as in unpopular or less popular versus 'dead' as in literally unplayable due to lack of infrastructure.
Is Ars Technica a dead publication asked the developer.
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.
Good news: Pocketpair knows and they are now in the licensing phase of the lifecycle
I just started playing it.
Palworld is dead to me when I have completly interest and/or my friend group doesn’t want to play
God damn. This, after their collab with the IDF and CDawgVA?
They might be one of the coolest studios today.
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.