“Palworld is now one of only seven games that have seen over 1 million concurrent players on Steam – the others include: PUBG (3.2 mil), Counter-Strike: Global Offensive (1.8 mil), Counter-Strike 2 (1.4 mil), Lost Ark (1.3 mil), Dota 2 (1.2 mil), and Cyberpunk 2077 (1 mil).”
I’ve played it on PC Game Pass, and IMO, it’s mostly shock and hype. After a short while, it becomes the same thing over and over. Capture or kill a lot of pals to level up and improve your strength. Then do it again on new pals for more strength. The base stuff changes a little, but it’s still basically the same.
This feels like new world and lost ark all over again. Huge hype while twitch bounties are up and then the player base will tank. Hopefully I’m wrong since it’s always nice to see small dev companies win.
Don’t worry, the devs have already won if the sales numbers are any indication.
As far as winning the larger gaming community’s opinion, I think that will depend on how they handle updates and bug fixes for the game going forwards. As an example, the dedicated servers have a massive glitch that causes you to lose all your progress and it’s hard to tell what causes it. Personally, how they respond to that bug (or bugs of similar magnitude) is my litmus test for whether this game will stand the test of time or not.
When you boil down any game like that, they don’t sound very fun. It’s about the experience as a whole.
I guess I should put it in perspective by saying I like Clicker (incremental) games. The good ones, anyhow. Yeah, every game is a loop of the same general thing. It’s how to you iterate on that thing as the player progresses that makes it good or bad. There isn’t enough change here as the level goes up.