Palworld, the "Pokémon With Guns" game, has seemingly come out of nowhere to become one of the biggest success stories in PC gaming. At time of posting it's breaking sales and concurrent player records, and seemingly everyone connected to video games is talking about it. And lots of them are getting bummed out.
Before I start, I think it's important to stress that I don't care one way or another about Palworld itself, or how good or bad it is. Personally, it's not for me, and I have some concerns about its pitch and its creator's involvement with AI, crypto and NFTs. But if you've bought this game and are enjoying it, then I'm happy for you. Video games rule.
I am, however, wondering about its success, and particularly the conditions that have led to it. Palworld's record-breaking launch feels like a high-water mark for a very particular corner of video games, a place where years of content creators, meme games and asset flips has landed us. We’re at a point in time where jokes, hype travelling at the speed of light and over-excited video game playthroughs have catapulted a game from the fringes to the record books in a single weekend.
Despite some long-term interest and loads of social media intrigue in the lead-up, there was--some early concern aside--almost zero coverage of this game on traditional outlets before release, then BAM, suddenly it was everywhere, selling over three million copies. Is this an indictment of that press, exposed here as being woefully out of touch with what so many gamers clearly wanted? Maybe! In hindsight, a good survival game mixed with a Pokémon joke seemed destined for success.
But I think if Palworld hadn't blown up for being "Pokemon With Guns", something else ("Call of Duty Farming Sim" or "Tamagotchi Roguelite") would have. Palworld feels like a defining moment for a certain part of the video game market: we are now living in a world where someone can make a PC survival game (itself almost a meme) with a joke premise and it doesn't just do well, it breaks sales and concurrent player records.
Is this good? I don't know. It's great for the developers of the game, it's great for Valve taking a cut of every sale and if you're enjoying the game, like I said, I'm happy for you. But personally, it feels as though in some key ways the bar has been not just lowered, but moved somewhere else entirely. There's a huge market out there of people happy to look at something that 5-10 years ago would have been rightly derided and instead turn it into a huge hit. There’s clearly also a huge audience out there raised on content creators, hype and memes, which has created its own commercial ecosystem, with its own tastes and desires that are almost completely alien to me. I look at how well this game has done, then look at countless other inspiring, creative and original games released on the PC lately that haven't, and it's depressing.
Yet...who am I to speak for anyone buying and enjoying this game if it's all so alien to me? I can't equate their tastes and wants with my own. Nobody buying this game is unaware of what else is out there; you can't visit a store like Steam without being exposed to everything from flight sims to visual novels.
Maybe some of the people paying money for Palworld have seen all those other games and don't care, or aren’t interested in them. Maybe they've been raised in a world where traditional studios, publishers and entire genres (you could even include Nintendo and Pokémon here!) have been slowly run into the ground, exploiting them with stuff like loot boxes and battle passes, to the point where a joke video game is now a better way to spend their cash.
You can't even argue that the game's success is down to some quirk of free-to-play pricing, because it costs $27! That's not spare change, so it's not like the audience is tossing a few bucks at Palworld for a quick laugh; this is a real video game with real pricing that over three million people have been very happy to pay. It blows so many of the industry's existing assumptions about pricing, what people are willing to pay for and how quickly they're willing to pay it, out the window
A lot of the Discourse I've seen over the weekend, from developers especially, has essentially been lamenting this game's success, and maybe they're right. Maybe it is terrible news for creators--those working on original ideas in original worlds in innovative new genres--that we live in a timeline where Palworld can sell millions of copies.
But it's our timeline. And if anyone is genuinely upset about the success of a single silly video game, it might be more constructive to stop looking just at Palworld and instead take a look at what got us here in the first place; what's happened to the games people aren't playing anymore, where they're playing them and how they're learning about them.
