Unpopular Opinion
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Let's be totally fucking honest, this game has only sold so many copies because it's a meme.
It's a game where you shoot bootleg pokemon with guns. That's it. If it didn't have art that could at best be generously described as "remixed" pokemon assets, few people would have cared about it, and even fewer people would have actually bought it. From the very first time I heard of this game a few weeks before its release, I've only ever heard it described as a game where you "play as an anime girl and shoot pokemon with guns". It's a great game for YouTubers, TikTokers and Streamers to "react" to and "get hype" about (the thumbnails almost make themselves), it's an easy topic for every game podcast to talk about, and that's about it.
Whether the developers intended for this to be the case or not doesn't change the fact that the game is a cheap knockoff of various other games mashed together, and it's very heavily riding on the coattails of a pokemon aesthetic. If the monsters didn't look almost exactly like pokemon that everybody knows and loves, nobody would give a damn about this game.
Personally I feel that the runaway success of Palworld shows just how shallow the video game world has become, both from developers and from players. There are so many good games out there that fail to find an audience, while a meme like Palworld sells millions of copies despite being utterly artless and devoid of creativity or individuality. I'm not sure if it's the influence-economy or what, but I miss the times when the subculture could collectively look at some creatively bankrupt bootleg-ass shit like Palworld and simply laugh it off instead of rewarding people for making low-effort legally-dubious bubblegum trash.
Or maybe I'm just jaded...
Sounds like the music industry: Tons of amazing artists toiling in anonymity, and remixed pablum making all the money.
Extremely probable, I'd say. Craftopia, their previous game, was pretty much "Breath of the Wild, but with survival crafting", and sold well on Steam. If you removed the copied aesthetic, in both cases, it would've flown under the radar.
Sad but true
Now now, there was some effort in making the pals. I mean, some genres have pretty much been done to death, so it's very hard to be creative. What would be a creative addition to a survival crafting game? Off the top of my head, I can only think of going underground, digging new spaces.
Also, just because it copies from a lot of games, doesn't mean the end result is bad. If you separate a pizza into individual components, you have things that, by themselves, might be good, but together are much better.
Yay! I'm not alone on the internet! Lol I'm shocked so many people who consider themselves savvy have eaten it up. You've just proven you are so easily bought. And bought by a demonstrably mediocre product. The devs hacked your brain. I'm actually surprised more people aren't outright pissed off about how obvious and blatant it is. Bread and circuses I suppose.
Not at all. The gameplay loop is good. The exploration is good. They took a lot of good aspects of many different game types and mashed them together. The game is good -- Have you compared this to any of the pokemon releases lately? They're so bland, shallow, poorly made bullshit, from a multi-billion dollar company, and you're ragging on some relatively unknown newcomer to the scene.
You're just being a hater. It's a $30 game that's better than MANY of the AAA titles that have been released in the past 5 years. It's telling that this "mediocre" product, not filled with season passes, and monetization schemes every turn you make, to have succeeded this wildly.
Personally I can agree that Pokemon games have themselves been coasting on mediocrity for a long time now, but that doesn't mean that Palworld isn't also totally devoid of originality, creativity and artistic integrity. Both can be true, and I'd argue that both are true. There are a lot of ways that Pokemon could and should be better, but clearly they aren't so bad that they didn't inspire the Palworld dev team to rip and "remix" their art assets...
Having said that, you'll probably never convince me that you or anyone else would have given Palworld the time of day had it not been "the game where you shoot pokemon with guns". The bootleg pokemon art style is the entire reason for the game's runaway success; it's the killer feature. And as someone who values games as a creative medium and not just a product, that shit just rubs me the wrong way. If that makes me a hater too then so be it.
Something palworld didn't do. The guy who got caught claiming that, eventually came clean and said he had morphed and touched up the models so they looked closer than they actually were. They didn't rip any assets, they didn't 'copy' pokemon. There was no AI gen being trained on pokemon models either. This was haters making up fake controversy. So now you've also allowed your ignorance surrounding the game, to affect your judgement of it.
No art is created in a vacuum. Every artist, every creation, stems from the inspiration of something else. Palworld and their studio just didn't shy away from using mechanics that were popular. They know those mechanics are fun, so why try and reinvent them for the sake of trying to be unique?