Palworld has broken Counter-Strike's all-time concurrent players peak at 1.8 million, and is now #2 most played game on Steam ever. It is only behind PUBG which holds the record at 3.2 million.

nanoUFO@sh.itjust.worksmod to Games@sh.itjust.works – 221 points –
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I hope Game Freak sees this as a wake up call. People will kill for a Pokemon game with a little innovation.

Why would they? It takes effort to make something innovative. They can make buckets of money by doing nothing. They might make more, but it's going to cost a lot more too.

This game literally cost 6 million though, that's nothing to the Pokemon company.

Pokemon Arceus had a little innovation. The thing is: a little innovation after decades of doing the same thing is like a textbook example of "too little, too late".

Also Pokémon Arceus was still empty and boring

So is Palworld if you played it. The island kinda lacks cohesion

Not even remotely the same level of empty. In Palworld there's 10-100x times the density of creatures and resources. Plus Palworld just looks better than Pokemon Arceus and also doesn't resort to fog to hide things popping into existence

Yeah. But it's also put together by a group of misfits that barely cobbled a game together. Not a decades long gaming empire.

" He built it in a cave, with spare parts!"

It's also worth noting, that this is an early access game.

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I don't think that GameFreak will see this as a wake up call. And even if it does, it might not do the necessary changes to Pokémon main series.

The stagnation runs deeper. It is partially caused by inertia ("we're selling well, why bother innovating?"), but also by GF's insistence on making the main series story-driven instead of gameplay-driven. Even if story-driven Pokémon goes a lot against the franchise's biggest strength - a wide, unique, and immersive universe to explore.

Except Palworld is insanely popular with essentially no story...

That's the point. Pokemon could be successful in the same way but they're saying Game Freak doesn't want to change how they do things.

Omg I'm an idiot, I completely misread what they were saying, I thought they were saying gf needed to focus more on story and the gameplay being stagnant doesn't help. I'll chalk that up to morning brain.

Shouldn't they have learned the lesson from Pokémon Go? That had absolutely no story that I was aware of.

Because it's gameplay-driven.

There's no Rotom bossing you around. No "sit down you player, as we tell you what's supposed to be your story". No unnecessary broken bridges forcing story linearity. The story that you see in this sort of game is the one that you build as you interact with the game, not the one that the developer wants you to watch.

More importantly: The Pokemon Company is a separate entity from Game Freak and Nintendo, with a third company also participating, Creatures Inc.

Pokemon games exist solely to drive people, especially the current younger generation, into the franchise. Licensed merchandise is THE money printer for them. In 2022, they reported 11.6 billion dollars in revenue just from that. They're at a point where they can literally ask "Why even bother with games?"

Yeah really goes to show just how massive this market is, and how horribly game freak has whiffed here

People will kill for a pokemon game that doesn't release broken as hell from bugs. Crazy idea I know

People will kill for a Pokemon game. Any Pokemon game. And gamefreak knows that

People like cathing cool animals and do thing with them valling it a pokemon like game is just weird. No one called pokemon final fantasy with animals.

Yeah it's obviously like Pokémon in several key regards but from what I've seen of it the actual game has a lot of originality and new concepts. We shouldn't need to completely reinvent everything all the time, when something has a big cultural impact on people as children they should be allowed to play with and evolve those concepts - I know Pokémon doesn't understand how evolution works but we as a society should take our cultural property seriously.

If you shove your ideas into kids brains then the adults who grow from those kids should own those ideas, the only reason we don't is because Disney wanted a monopoly on mouse picture.

Set copyright to something reasonable like twenty years and focus on making a better society with free growth of ideas and expression rather than protecting the profits of the richest few

Pokémon doesn't understand how evolution works

The wordplay... I love it. Haha

Honestly, I don't think it has any original concepts, but it does merge a lot of concepts from other games into a fairly cohesive package. There's nothing it does, from what I've seen, that isn't done in another game, but the fact that all systems connect with each other and work together is fairly impressive.

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