3mo ago

Palworld faces the difficult choice of whether to become a live-service game or stay buy-to-play, PocketPair’s CEO says

automaton-media.com (UPDATE) Palworld faces the difficult choice of whether to become a live-service game or stay buy-to-play, PocketPair’s CEO says - AUTOMATON WEST

Palworld developer's CEO Takuro Mizobe talks about the possibility of the game switching to a live-service model.

Games @sh.itjust.works

automaton-media.com /en/news/palworld-faces-the-difficult-choice-of-whether-to-become-a-live-service-game-or-stay-buy-to-play-pocketpairs-ceo-says/

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https://twitter.com/Palworld_EN/status/1834947171944485224
We are not changing our game's business model, it will remain buy-to-play and not f2p or GaaS.
- Kinda brutal the journalist didn’t mention that the quote they were taking was from an interview from several months ago.
  
  “Journalist”
- Up you go, needs more visibility
  
  Beep beep coming though!

How about finishing the damn thing and than,
Idk, making something new perhaps, dare I say, even original?
- Yeah but why would you want to finish a game as a dev nowadays? You get paid for your early beta releases (= "early access"), not for finishing it from there.
  
  Basically, an unfinished game has infinite possibilities.

Is ~20k and dropping daily players enough to warrant a live service model? 🤔
- Didn't they make 10-100s millions of dollars on this? Pays a lot of salaries while you make new paid content.
  EDIT : They made at least 12 million sales on steam, and had 7 million players on Xbox, which may be Gamepass, but still makes them money.
  So at $30, that's 66million from steam minus 30% for steams cut, so they banked 44 million at least.
  They can pay 440 devs 100k for at least a year. I assume their team is a bit smaller than that, so they likely have years of runway. Linkedin lists size as between 50-200 in japan, so that likely means they are making $50-70k, and there are likely more than 100 devs. I would guess they have a 4 year runway from Steam sales, and maybe 1-2 year from Gamepass.
  They got some time to think.
  
  According to their careers page, they have about 60 employees. And, knowing japanese game dev salaries, a lot of those devs (excluding senior devs) probably make around 30-50k a year depending on seniority unless it's a unicorn company.
  
  no line must go up, only up, up now and up tomorrow and the days after too. fire all the devs too, paying them makes line go down.
- Anyone know if The Finals counts as a "live service" game? It's free to play and I think it's fantastic - both the game and the fact it's free.
  I just don't play games enough to justify the huge asking prices anymore. The last games I paid for were COD MW2 and Cyberpunk and I doubt I'll ever drop $70+ for a game again, especially when there's games like splitgate and whatnot that are free (not that I ever tried the new one. lol)
  
  I would definitely classify The Finals as a live service. The way I see it, any game that is designed to be "never-ending", and have a constant stream of new content (free or paid) would fall under this category of game.
  I wouldn't say it's a requirement for all live service games, but I'd also say that anything that uses "seasonal" content models would also be considered a live service.
  
  You could always become a patientgamer !patientgamers@sh.itjust.works
  
  Yes, it's a live service game. Most major free to play games are. Instead of selling you the game or selling adspace to advertisers, they sell you bits and pieces of the game like skins and such.

Meanwhile I avoided playing because I wanted to wait until it was out of early access and had its full release... Seems like I'll either never get that, or by the time I do, the game will already be dead
- If it's dead by then, it wouldn't have been a good investment. I'd rather not waste time in a game that won't live past the hype.
  
  I feel like I already got way more than my money's worth out of the game, and I'm happy to have moved on to other games. Not every game has to last forever.
- same
- Same boat, waiting for 1.0, now worried I'll miss the boat entirely, but I'm not going to buy their early access for that fear mongering. They made millions, they can ensure their game lives on one way or another.
- Doesn't matter if it's "dead" or not, it's not really meant to be a massively multiplayer game.

Wow, this shouldn't be a hard choice. Keeping the current model of buy to play would be best, I wouldn't think that Palworld would even benefit from a live-service model, given those games seem to die a lot faster than the standard buy and play.
- Typically live service games last a lot longer in terms of new content and updates. There are a lot of recent complete failures of live services though that didn't make it more than a couple of months ... they're just bad games.

If a CEO of a company don't even know what to do you know the product is doomed to fail. They should've had this kind of stuff figured out way at early access launch, or even before that already.

Its honestly such a dead game at the moment, as in the world feels super empty and uninteresting. The pathing for the Pals is really bad too - trying to build a multistorey building is basically a nonstarter as they can't really navigate up stairs.
Based on that you can get costumes/skins for your Pals, I'm pretty sure they'll go live service with those as micro transactions.
- It was a fun game for a few hours, but my god it was so fucking overrated. They had a lucky shot hitting the timing on the early access since Pokemon was just another terrible lazy cashgrab job, so practically anything that did even remotely better would get praised into oblivion.
  And like 4 months later only 1% of the amount of peak players still remains. I don't think they'll ever get close to that peak again.

They have already been charging people for the game so if they become a free to play live service it feels like a bait and switch.

Considering the type of game it is, they should go buy to play and then release expansions later on instead.

It was already Clarified that is going to be buy-to-play

They should have added a battle tower, that'd add a lot more replay value and keep people coming back years later.
Source: Pokemon games like the DS generation of Pokemon games.

Heck live service.

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