From Windows Central:
- Just a few days after its launch, Pocketpair’s new “Pokémon with guns” open world survival creature capture game Palworld is already breaking Steam records.
- Specifically, it reached 730,000 concurrent players earlier this morning, making it the 10th most played game in Steam history.
- That number continued to soar until Palworld peaked at 855,425 players, putting it within striking distance of Baldur’s Gate 3’s record of 875,343.
- In addition to being available on Steam, you can also play Palworld on Xbox or on PC through the Microsoft Store client. Notably, it’s on Xbox Game Pass as well.
- Update: Palworld‘s numbers have only ballooned even further throughout the weekend, with the game now peaking at 1,281,669 players on Steam.
Palworld has only continued to climb upwards since I originally wrote this article, with the game breaking 1 million players and hitting a new peak of 1,281,669 on Steam this morning. That blows through both Elden Ring’s and Cyberpunk 2077’s records of 953,426 and 1,054,388 concurrent players, respectively, and puts Palworld in fifth place on Steam’s top 5 all-time most played games list.
Link to the rest at Windows Central
Fact Check: Has Palworld Copied Pokemon’s Designs?
From The Sports Rush:
After the upcoming Indiana Jones title was accused of copying Uncharted, the newly-released Palworld has come under plagiarism allegations. Fans claim the game has plagiarized numerous features from Nintendo’s famous Pokemon series.
Pocket Pair developed Palworld, an open-world action-adventure game. The game has multiple unique creatures called “Pals” that players can battle and capture. Later, the those creatures help you fight others, travel, and construct bases. Since its announcement, many people have compared the concept of Pals to the “Pocket Monsters” from the Pokemon franchise.
This 2024-released game became an instant hit on Steam, becoming the most-played game on the platform within 24 hours. Palworld’s gameplay is similar to Ark: Survival Evolved. However, it was difficult to overlook the similarities with Game Freak’s masterwork. Fans even analyzed how the Pals possibly stole Pokemon’s designs. Because of these issues, many fans nicknamed the game “Pokemon with Guns.”
Pocket Pair’s history with generative AI has worsened the situation
The case of Palworlds plagiarising Pokemon worsened when the developer Pocket Pair’s relationship with generative AI surfaced. The studio previously released a game called AI: Art Imposter, an AI drawing party game. The players can instruct the AI to make images without requiring any aesthetic skills to create beautiful artwork.
Furthermore, Pocket Pair CEO Takuro Mizobe has complimented generative AI, recognizing its enormous potential. In an old tweet, Mizobe stated that generative AI technology might one day be powerful enough to make art without violating copyright laws. Many artists are lately denouncing AI for taking over their work and exploiting their artworks without permission to train AI technology.
Link to the rest at The Sports Rush and thanks to F. for both tips.
PG says that more than one disruptive technology has resulted in a lot of thrown elbows by an upset incumbent.
Update: PALWORD was released on Friday and Monday morning it reached 4M *sales* (plus an unspecified number of players on Game Pass) with sales running at 86,000 an hour, at $30. And 1.5M concurrent PC players on Steam. Plus the players not on Steam (Windows store, Xbox store, Game Pass, etc). People are buying and *playing* the thing.
This is not the first game in the survival/crafting genre nor the first to make a splash in early release. It is something of a trend for the genre going back to ARK: Evolved (humans vs dinosaurs!) in 2015, Valheim (Vikings in another dimension) in 2021, and GROUNDED (miniaturized kids in a backyard). Except for GROUNDED (from OBSIDIAN/Microsoft) all from smaller/Indie studios. All successful but not quite as Palworld, which has netted at least $100M in its “opening weekend”.
If nothing else, that kind of money will come in handy to finish/evolve the game (it has an online multiplayer component so it can add microtransactions and other Live service game traits like FORTNITE or WORLD OF WARCRAFT). Or to defend against copyright claims.
The whole phenomenon bears watching to see how much AI went into its development because Pokemon isn’t the the only successful game its art style shows echoes of.
It’ll be interesting to see what if anything NINTENDO does and where they file.
I’ve no idea how japanese copyright deals with (apparent) derivative works or if they even have anything like fair use/fair dealing, but there will be many more such questions popping up all over.
In other AI gaming news, last summer private citizens modded SKYRIM, a top selling, 12 year old RPG to add chatbot-driven characters you can hold enture conversations with.
It has been suggested that AI could be used to remaster old games to bring the graphics to modern standards and replace character text dialogue to synthetic voices.
Even before GPT3 was unleashed, Microsoft’s GITHUB software developers site offer a tool that converts prompts into high quality software code.
And last November Microsoft signed a deal with a startup(?) to offer a suite of standard AI tools to XBOX developers.
Gaming is a $350B a year business, globally, with the top games taking 4-5 years to complete and costing north of $200m plus up to $50M in advertising. And still running the risk of failing to find a market the way PALWORLD has despite being an “early release” game (i.e.,buggy and incomplete). By contrast, last year’s Sony’s sole first party game, SPIDER-MAN 2 cost $250M and sold 6m copies in three months. Sony still made a profit but nowhere as much as they hoped for. Part of it was their game came out around the same time as XBOX’s “SKYRIM IN SPACE” STARFIELD, which racked up 13 million gamers in one month. (Sometimes you beat the bear, sometimes the bear beats you. 😉 )
All through 2023 there been reports of layoffs, cancelled game half done, and even closed studios–even at Sony–and 2024 is starting with more of the same. There has been grumbling about AI muscling into game development by coders and voice actors but current AAA game economics are marginal for any developer not connected to the GAME PASS subscription service so AI adoption is innevitable, too much money (and survival) is at stake.
Like the Borg say, resistance is futile. Adapt or die.