Palworld Becomes the 7th Game Ever to Reach 1 Million Concurrent Players on Steam

It's what Pokémon should have been a good decade ago.

Picking up charmander and using them as a flamethrower. Cooking Pokémon. Using them to water your farm.

Pokémon is one of the most wasted IPs I've ever seen!

I'm just waiting for ntscworld so I can buy the dual pack of almost identical games.

Original demographic? I don’t know man, I’m almost 40 and the Palworld trailer just looks like a bunch of zoomer shit to me. (Which is fine, of course.)

Legends Arceus or whatever it was called could have been my favorite Pokemon game but they took so many weird decisions and made it a chore instead of fun and as always made it super baby mode and didn't go for any kind of online options. A good 3D Pokemon MMO is possible, but Gamefreak and Nintendo don't seem to have any interest in one ever existing. Also, I'll be honest, I see no reason whatsoever that they limit the Pokemon available and cut old ones, with all the money they have and employees, there's no reason they can't incorporate every single pokemon into newer games and in an MMO setting they could even do certain ones active at certain times or some other way to make them feel exciting to get.

Yes, exactly. The fans have spoken and we want the real Vaporeon!

Translation: "fuck kids, i should be to focus of everything"

Quite a lot honestly, but the trailers are really awful in terms of advertising what the game actually is. It's a survival game with management sim elements, using creature collection as its core gameplay loop. It feels weirdly cohesive in terms of mashing together these styles - kinda like Dave the Diver in that regard.

Far as I've been able to tell, it was first announced in 2021, so it's been in development since then, at latest.

There's no evidence whatsoever of AI use (lot of accusations, but actual devs have spoken out and challenged them). Really strikes me that there's a non-zero number of people who feel somewhat threatened by this game's existence, considering the death threats the dev team has reportedly been receiving.

People have been looking for Pokémon replacement for years, anything even slightly innovating on the concept is going to do very well. It doesn't have any microtransactions (yet?), it's actively improving, has fully animated real time battles, a difficulty/complexity level appropiate for adults, decent coop and a pretty good sense of antiestablishment humour that I think works really well with the type of millennial that is sick of what Pokémon offers.

It is definitely rough, but I haven't hit a show stopping bug in 13hrs (plenty of stuff like pals clipping through stuff of pathing fucking up though). If it's kept regularly updated I could see myself putting a lot of hours into it. It's definitely still an early access title but it's eating Pokémons stale lunch.

Yeah it's clearly shovelware, the devs made Craftopia and this is very obviously that game with Pokemon stuff shoved in in place of more traditional Minecraft gameplay. It cribs unabashedly from every popular game of the last decade, and it looks like there really isn't anything to do other than grind, like every other generic wilderness survival crafting game. ARK seems like one of the prime inspirations, which blows my mind because I can't imagine anyone looking at ARK and thinking "oh yeah let's do more of that".

I would be shocked if the game still has momentum 6 months from now.