“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).”
Can’t help but feel like this is the market that exists for anything Pokémon adjacent because Pokémon has sucked ass for like a decade.
Off the top of my head we’ve had Digimon, Monster Hunter: Stories, Yo-Kai Watch, Dragon Quest Monsters, Cassette Beasts, TemTem, Ooblets and Monster Crown. The only one that really hit it pretty big was TemTem and it was nowhere near the success of this.
temtem screwed up by adding micro transactions. and a paid battle pass. like, I’ve already bought the game and now you want me to spend more money like it’s a f2p piece of junk?
I’d like to add Anode Heart and Monster Sanctuary to that fine list.
Jade Cocoon was also pretty fun but it’s old as hell by this point.
Whenever I read this title, I wish for a spiritual successor with modernized graphics and animations as well as the same story depth. It was a damn near perfect game and I adored the merging process of monsters for their spells and optics. More of that, please! I loved the various weapon effects, the taming melodies… such a beautiful game.
Coromon too
Its weird because except for the looks and taming mechanic it has nothing to do with pokemon. But yeah it probably helps to get people interested in the first place.
I get that direct comparisons to Pokémon might seem too surface level to someone who has played both. But let’s not beat around the bush: People have been begging GameFreak for something like this for years now. And I don‘t mean the guns, but everything else, really. There‘s a reason so many Pokémon mods are made for these type of games anyway. Really, players couldn‘t have been more obvious about what they wanted all these years.
As someone who has not played Palworld but practically swore off mainline Pokémon since Sword and Shield (made an exception for Arceus), I couldn’t agree more with this.
Now I’ve looked at the Palworld trailer and not only does this look like more than just a Pokémon knock off like Digimon or Yokai Watch, this looks very competently made. Sure the guns might be shock value, but the point is they’re doing more with the concept than the same shit Game freak has been doing since 1996 on the fucking Game Boy. They certainly aren’t relying on that shock value.
I’m actually tempted to buy Palworld.
Played it until 2AM with my girlfriend last night, even though we both fully knew we had work in the morning. This morning is not great, but it was so, so worth it. I can’t remember the last time I had that much fun experiencing a game for the first time–maybe Warhammer II on release. I’d definitely recommend, especially for the price.
Ah damn, if only my gf had a gaming PC. I think she’d like this a lot.
Wasn’t there an official branded pokemon dotalike for a while? I mean, they tried the approach of “let’s make a conventional PC genre game but with Pokemon” and it didn’t stick.
It was a lazy cash grab. They outsourced it to the same chinese company who‘ve made plenty mobile dota clones before. They dumbed down their usual game and slapped pokemon skins on it. It‘s a fairly awful game.
Then there‘s PokemonGO which had a rough start quality vise. It was also outsourced but at the very least it was successful and different, though way too simplified for my taste. Of course I‘m one of those conservative gamers who don‘t want to point their camera at virtual things outside so I‘m a little biased I guess.
Yeah they also made a Monster Hunter mobile game and it just feels so wrong. I can’t do it.
Yeah Pokemon UNITE. It was fairly bad with somewhat P2W mtx.