this post was submitted on 31 Jan 2024
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Katharine's review today steps back from that flash-in-the-pan take (and it wasn't a good one).
No doubt there's some empty calories here, though.
Idk I guess I still didn’t get the vibe it was anywhere as special as the hype train is treating it. It honestly feels weirdly artificial for a hype train too.
I doubt a no name company would be pulling all this attention out of marketing alone. If it was this easy everyone would do it.
In all fairness, this is not a great game. It's a very derivative game whose only appeal is that it combines things in a way that hasn't been done much. Like many other hype trains of questionable quality, it just happened to scratch the right itch for the right people at the right time.
Kind of how Fortnite was a rehash of stolen ideas (originally) of PUBG
The reason people originally hated Fortnite was because not only did they blatantly plagiarise PUBG, Sony also intentionally screwed over PUBG to make Fortnite more popular
I haven't heard of the Sony-PUBG shenannigans, would you care to tell me more about it?
It's been quite a long time but iirc there was originally a deal going on between them that got last second tossed out for Fortnite instead. Sadly I don't fully remember
This feels like a weird take if you haven’t even played it. Like, how would you know?
The game is flawed, but genuinely super fun, and has a ton going for it outside of “Pokemon with guns”. In a lot of ways it’s what I always wished Pokemon could be, at least in the ways it makes its monsters feel unique and like actual partners instead of battle slaves, which is ironic considering Palworld is the one with actual slavery.
You're getting downvoted, but I think there's something to this, even if it's not the whole story. The game had a robust presence unnaturally quickly on Tiktok and among streamers. This studio isn't big enough to have engineered a big campaign, but it's quite possible they did some small, targeted marketing and it really paid off.
Yeah but also I think the nature of viral content is just spinning out into chaos with the amount of AI generated content and bots. I am sure palworld deserves its popularity to an extent but it’s the velocity and utter completeness of palworld’s popularity that feels weird. At some level I think algorithms are heavily distorting cultural phenomena like this to be much more “winner takes all” in terms of popularity. It is not only how humans tend to act but it is also the most profitable way to monetize culture.
I've been seeing people mention "the game has been in development for 2 years" and all these trailers and stuff but... I didn't hear a thing until the game released, it exploded and now it's all I'm seeing.
Exactly. Cassette Beasts and various other indie games have made bigger rounds before.
The only reason Palworld got popular was because of clickbait youtubers
The studio doesn't make games for the good ideas, but to make money. Shocker, I know. But get this; the developers are paying for this parser that determines what kind of product will sell well, based on social media.
The developers have admitted to using something like that to decide what kind of games they'll make.