The Pokemon with guns game seems to be doing very well
Palworld
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I want this game to not only blow up on first release but to be so immensely successful that it hurts the Pokemon company so fucking hard that they'll regret ever treating their games like shit.
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Looks cool, but is Xbox/PC only. If it comes to PS systems or Switch I might dig a bit deeper.
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@zeltrax225 said in Palworld:
I want this game to not only blow up on first release but to be so immensely successful that it hurts the Pokemon company so fucking hard that they'll regret ever treating their games like shit.
If Yokai Watch didn't do it, I'm not sure anything will.
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@zeltrax225 said in Palworld:
I want this game to not only blow up on first release but to be so immensely successful that it hurts the Pokemon company so fucking hard that they'll regret ever treating their games like shit.
With the fact that these games are primarily designed with kids and mind and not the adults who have been rather picky with the direction of the series since generation 2 or 3. That’s likely never to happen.
So you either accept the mess the series has become or you move on.
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An Ark-like survival game with some UI similar to BOTW and some elements from PLA with designs evoking a Pokemon feel. TPC is quivering in their boots.
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@Nobodyman I wanted to argue that yokai watch serves mostly the domestic market (Japan) rather than the international one and that Palworld have already shown to be a massive success both Internationally and in Japan and people has been comparing it to Pokemon. Which is really to say that it manages to create more noise than Yokai watch ever will.
Besides, Yokai watch is still mostly Pokemon but Palworld is Pokemon and other stuff(good stuff) and shows that you can pair them up and still do it well. The developer has a rept for being good EA and then doing well in the first year or so and then not trying anymore which is, well, something I hope they don't repeat again considering the success of this title.
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@Time-Control-Magician there's no reason to say that Palworld won't be a significant threat/serious competitor to kids too. It's not like it is age-restricted. Look at Fortnite and what it did to FPS and how many kids they've brought over to FPS/Battle Royale/Online gaming scene.
Market share is still market share. And there's no reason to accept this mess at all because even AAA kids' games are getting better at game design and they have significantly less budget than the biggest franchise in the world to work with.
I know that TPC is a merc/toys company now more than it is a game company and the gaming revenue is literally one tiny slice compared to their earnings but to keep their overall revenue going and to grow it, they still need the games to do well. And now they are heading into a mess where the games WILL not be able to keep up with the rest of the franchise anymore. It will hurt the company's revenue in a significant way if nothing is done to the games. This isn't whataboutism as much as it is certain to happen.
They've been sloppy about their games for a long time now and it will bleed because of that. This might just be a drop of bucket in the ocean in terms of competition but competition has got to be necessary for the game to grow.
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@zeltrax225 said in Palworld:
They've been sloppy about their games for a long time now and it will bleed because of that. This might just be a drop of bucket in the ocean in terms of competition but competition has got to be necessary for the game to grow.
This is wishful thinking at best to me. My personal opinion is that game quality doesn't seem to have an effect on Pokemon sales. That's based on my subjective opinion on the games.
A slightly more objective take is the same thing, given critic scores and sales. SWSH and SV have both sold like hotcakes because the Switch is so successful and it continues to be. If Switch 2 knocks it out of the park as well, I expect the next games will continue that trajectory. If it flounders, then the games might.
The narrative of a competitor whipping pokemon or bad games doing them in forcing TPC to change their business practices just doesn't seem to be based in a reality that I've experienced in my 20+ years as a fan. Digimon, Yokai Watch, TemTem, Kindred Fates, DokeV. Whether these games are successful or not, they never seem to have any effect on pokemon sales. I don't think this will be any different.
I'm also curious where you're seeing palworld's success in Japan? There are hardly enough Xbox's in the country for it to be a success on that front and I haven't seen any data to back it up otherwise.
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I’m also looking forward to Dokev
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@andre Palworld is developed by a Japanese company and they've done good work in their marketing seeing how their EA is given a week before to the top streamers (Vtubers,Live reactors,etc) in the Japanese internet ecosystem. It has been gathering alot of audience and players over there. There are no stats per se seeing how we are still early but I'm sure you can find them like a month later.
Regarding your other point on this being a threat to the Pokemon's game design. Yeah, I'll agree that if I have to say definitively whether it is a yes or no, it's a no. But my point is there's a chance this could grow and become big or inspire other developers to make more creature collecting(if you can even just call it that at this point) that can take away market share/interest/love from the Pokemon audience.
It's what I wish to happen and like you've said, it might as well be unrealistic and stupid but I would rather see the potential of it being a disruptor than waive it off entirely.
You also need to keep in mind that Digmon, at one point, was an actual competitor to the franchise. Temtem didn't blow up as Palworld has done (probably because it wasn't as "shocking" a game design as Palworld has). Pokemon did consider their competitors in development (such as Digimon and Yokai) and the games were at one point banking on Black and White/ BW 2 to succeed because of how bad things were. That's why BW tried to change up the formula. That didn't do well and it hurt them hard.
It was on a path to irrelevancy.
What blew the franchise up in terms of revenue and public interest, at least back then, was Pokemon GO.
And I fucking hate that shit but it serves the revenue and it kept the games going. GO carried their revenue so hard that it left every other series in the dust. But then there's an argument to be made that Digimon was already faring pretty badly so there's no one to be left in the dust.
The point with GO and now with Palworld is that you have people who don't own a pokemon game, or owned one before and stopped following, or simply don't care about the franchise come in and spend real money/time on it. Even if it doesn't damage the franchise by having Palworld around, it is still evidence that there is a whole market of players out there that they are not tapping in which is at least worth something.
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@zeltrax225 said in Palworld:
@Time-Control-Magician there's no reason to say that Palworld won't be a significant threat/serious competitor to kids too.
Aside from the fact that you’ve had series like Digimon, Medabots, Monster Rancher, & Yokai Watch each try their own hand at what Pokemon does and have either fallen to the wayside or simply not made as big an impact as Pokemon has?
Not to mention I don’t know if we should look at Fornite between Fortnite’s divisive reputation among adults specifically because how kid friendly it is and how it’s lead to a smattering of Battle Royale like games that more or less blur together.
I know that TPC is a merc/toys company now more than it is a game company and the gaming revenue is literally one tiny slice compared to their earnings but to keep their overall revenue going and to grow it, they still need the games to do well. And now they are heading into a mess where the games WILL not be able to keep up with the rest of the franchise anymore. It will hurt the company's revenue in a significant way if nothing is done to the games. This isn't whataboutism as much as it is certain to happen.
Given that the biggest issue with the last two and half Pokémon games were how they ran poorly on the hardware they were designed all they have to do is fix that problem. The primary audience is not going to care about not being able to use all 1000+ Pokemon in the next entry or whatever new chintzy regional gimmick they come up with or of course the new designs not being “Pokemon” enough.
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I don’t think anything will ever hurt Pokemon’s sales, it’s the highest grossing media franchise ever, it’s made more money than Star Wars and the MCU combined
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I usually never watch Youtubers, but I decided to watch something about this game and, god, this is like heaven for any Brazilian with the humor of a 10yo (I laughed to tears at least twice just watching the video below):
As for it taking some popularity away from Pokémon, I don't know. From what I saw, even though the game promoted itself using its "bestiary", it doesn't seem like the game relies too much on the "monster collecting" side of gameplay, so despite using Pokémon to promote itself (some designs are clear cheap rip-offs of existing Pokémon) it doesn't seem to appeal to the game kind of crowd.
It also doesn't help the monsters look very generic, showing a level of focus that is more similar to regular RPG games (where the monsters are side features) than to monster collecting games (where monsters are the main feat). -
@Time-Control-Magician they took years to hit the sales that palworld has done in days. Obviously, that isn't to say that they are terrible games and that any of what they did was a lesser feat but the scene for gaming has changed considerably now. Be it through marketing, streaming, and revenue wise. I don't like it but it has changed. ALL of the games you've mentioned followed the same system as Pokemon but Palworld goes beyond that because it capitalizes (copy, lmao) aspects from ARK, Botw, and a bunch of stuff to make a monster collecting game not just monster collecting. It's perceived as a good game because it works well so well.
It's an embarrassment when it comes to monster design though. It shamelessly rips off from Pokemon designs and feels like creativity bankruptcy at its lowest.
Blurring FPS together with other stuff is the whole reason Fortnite works as a comparison. It blew up, is a big thing with kids, has non-realistic and highly stylized graphics, and took away a fair share of FPS/Battle Royale players. Pal will never be as big as Fortnite but there is valid ground for comparison.
It's not just a hardware problem even if it is the biggest problem. And the development side is strained to keep up with bugs fixing, new release, and DLC that eventually it faces the possibility of collapse/a huge calendar delay.
The games have become stale and repetitive and the game design is decades old. I'm not going to win against an argument that says that Pokemon won't be dethroned because of course it won't be, but I'm arguing for the real possibility that the TPC will at least look at this and how it can be a problem and try to make their games better.
I think there might be an impression that I'm on the side that says Palworld is better! Pokemon is going to obsolete one day! but no, I'm still on the Pokemon side simply Palworld is a shameless ripoff (in terms of character design) and ultimately is a mixing pot of a bunch of stuff that they stole from other games. But I want it to hurt Pokemon games and I want it to get bigger but never win, just big enough to have TPC consider changing things up. Like they did with Legends but with more focus and agenda.
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@zeltrax225 said in Palworld:
I know that TPC is a merc/toys company now more than it is a game company and the gaming revenue is literally one tiny slice compared to their earnings but to keep their overall revenue going and to grow it, they still need the games to do well.
Ya know, people keep saying this but the games have been getting worse with every outing for like a decade, but the newest game is always the best selling in the franchise's history, so I don't know that it really does matter that the quality sucks now, its "good enough" for the general audience.
Outside of some of the remakes, none of the mainline titles have sold less than 15 million... And Sword/Shield is their best selling one EVER since the very first at 26 million, and Scarlett/Violet is right behind it at 23 million and it's only been out a year instead of five.
(And you can't really compare the first game to anything else. At the time it was the ONLY one, it was a huge phenomenom, and the gameboy had an insanely long lifespan. Gold/Silver sold really well too and everything after had been a bit less.)
I mean maybe if the next one is even more unpolished and buggy than S/V was and gets similar negative reviews that drops but I think the target audience doesn't even care if the games are bad, they just want their fix.
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@Robby Oh no definitely. It's at the point where the quality of the games probably doesn't matter to the revenue of TPC as a whole. On the surface, at least.
This is a marketing/merc company more than it is a game company.
Pokemon sells so well because it is a marketing behemoth and I hated how much I enjoyed SV so even their games aren't COD levels of dogshit.A huge chunk of revenue is based on merc sales yet the only medium where they release new creatures is through the games. I guess you can dress Pikachu/eevee in like costume number 93 and ship it off but my point is Merc schedule is dependent on games being released on time. If your game crashes on you and you can't squeeze into that timeframe to align with the merc then you'll be eating a significant loss due to delays.
Games are buggy as hell and the development can barely keep up with corporate decisions. They'll still release, sure. But it will come to a point where it just breaks because they can't keep up with the release schedule. The team is still fixing bugs from SV today, fixing the bugs from the new DLC that was shifted FORWARD and while working on the next game. Yes, there's two teams and yes it's still a small team relatively speaking.
They can't shift to new development platform in a short amount of time and is forced to work with an outdated system that the game suffers from because of how much of a clusterfuck and an antique it is.People will still buy buggy games to get their fix, headlines from game reviewers don't matter and it is a lost cause trying to get GF to listen and expand their staff but if we think about it logically there has got to be some long-term consequences that are just about to tip over the boiling point...eventually.
Maybe an exaggeration and they'll blow us away with a title on Switch 2 but we'll see.
It's insane from both a technical standpoint and an everything else standpoint to have a release schedule that they do around the number of staff that they do. And their sheer refusal to scale their staff to what they are putting out isn't helping things.
The games have a small slice in the overall profits of TPC but they serve as what is essentially the core of it.
If you whittle away public interest either through a competent competitor and/or long-term disregard for quality, it will affect the rest of the revenue streams like a domino effect eventually. -
Sure, that's the theory.
But they've had 25 years of being the king. Digimon, Monster Rancher, Yokai Watch, lots of things get an audience or some early attention but then fall off or to a distant second place. The multimedia empire is too big to fail at this point, too ingrained for anything to catch up and dethrone it. If theres a bad show or a bad game it just gets ridden out until the next one a few months later.
Palworld is getting some early hype as the Pokemon with Guns game, but how long will that linger? That got it a ton of day one sales but after the initial premise dies down what then?
When was the last time you heard anything about TemTem? That was totally poised as a Pokemon killer.I mean the signs are there for the audience of this forum at least, the Scarlet Violet thread is only four pages after two years when a new gen once upon a time would generate hundreds of pages and thousands of posts of constant discussion.
Nothing short of them releasing an outright unplayable game, or where the bugs are so many and so numerous every player finds a ton of them constantly is going to hurt them, and I don't think they're ever going to be that rushed and bad. Buggy with bad graphics its obvious they can get away with, because by the next game the fans don't remember that, they just remember catching their critters.
.We all complained about Dexit but that didn't affect sales at all. But then, I haven't really enjoyed a new game in the franchise and gotten attached to the new critters since probably XY. Sun and Moon was okay and did some things to mix up the formula, but nothing that gen really stuck with me outside of a handful of critters. That was also a pitiful Dex size generation with only 80 monsters... 9 of those starters and 20 of them the ugly designed ultra beasts an
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An interesting thread regarding what is the problem with Palworld (and addressing people saying Pokémon plagiarized Dragon Quest because they had monsters based on similar concepts):
There is also an interview linked where the producers stated they designed their own models, but by now there are many model comparisons around the internet showing multiple Pal models fit Pokémon models down to every polygon, which is basically impossible to happen by chance.
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@zeltrax225 said in Palworld:
@andre Palworld is developed by a Japanese company and they've done good work in their marketing seeing how their EA is given a week before to the top streamers (Vtubers,Live reactors,etc) in the Japanese internet ecosystem. It has been gathering alot of audience and players over there. There are no stats per se seeing how we are still early but I'm sure you can find them like a month later.
I am interested in them for sure. If they can actually make a dent in Japan then that is a true accomplishment.
Regarding your other point on this being a threat to the Pokemon's game design. Yeah, I'll agree that if I have to say definitively whether it is a yes or no, it's a no. But my point is there's a chance this could grow and become big or inspire other developers to make more creature collecting(if you can even just call it that at this point) that can take away market share/interest/love from the Pokemon audience.
It's what I wish to happen and like you've said, it might as well be unrealistic and stupid but I would rather see the potential of it being a disruptor than waive it off entirely.
I Just don't see this happening. I'm pretty open to another game series taking off and being huge, but I think Pokemon has to fall off in a way that we can't imagine and truly turn off even the most casual of players for them not to ever care.
You also need to keep in mind that Digmon, at one point, was an actual competitor to the franchise.
Did it? The anime was popular, but there was never Digimania the same way there was Pokemania. The merch and games just didn't have the same appeal and there wasn't enough consistency and that's even with the digital monster toy. I'd love to find hard data about it, but I've been unsuccessful so far.
Temtem didn't blow up as Palworld has done (probably because it wasn't as "shocking" a game design as Palworld has).
This is true.
Pokemon did consider their competitors in development (such as Digimon and Yokai) and the games were at one point banking on Black and White/ BW 2 to succeed because of how bad things were. That's why BW tried to change up the formula. That didn't do well and it hurt them hard.
It was on a path to irrelevancy.
What blew the franchise up in terms of revenue and public interest, at least back then, was Pokemon GO.
And I fucking hate that shit but it serves the revenue and it kept the games going. GO carried their revenue so hard that it left every other series in the dust. But then there's an argument to be made that Digimon was already faring pretty badly so there's no one to be left in the dust.
Digimon had been in the dust for over a decade when Go came out, but yes, you're right that gen 5 was sort of a downturn for Pokemon. Still, the scale of it is interesting. Those games are considered failures because they didn't sell 20 million +, but their sales are not far from the 2 generations before them and every gen has sold as many copies as most digimon games combined. They are playing in different leagues.
The point with GO and now with Palworld is that you have people who don't own a pokemon game, or owned one before and stopped following, or simply don't care about the franchise come in and spend real money/time on it. Even if it doesn't damage the franchise by having Palworld around, it is still evidence that there is a whole market of players out there that they are not tapping in which is at least worth something.
I agree with you on this last point. I hope the game takes off and becomes more widely available.
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@access-timeco said in Palworld:
An interesting thread regarding what is the problem with Palworld (and addressing people saying Pokémon plagiarized Dragon Quest because they had monsters based on similar concepts):
There is also an interview linked where the producers stated they designed their own models, but by now there are many model comparisons around the internet showing multiple Pal models fit Pokémon models down to every polygon, which is basically impossible to happen by chance.
I read it was a newly graduate character designer who churned out their 100 critters. The team apparently didn't know what a "rig" was. Recently even denied inspiration from Pokemon?* It kinda feels bad to see this sort of stuff get celebrated because "game is actually good" and "gamefreak sucks."
*Oops, pardon me, it has been said elsewhere that it was not their main inspiration
I would like to see the source interview on this one but this is floating around now too:
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the debate and ongoing debacle between the Palworld supporters and the Palworld deniers has been fun to watch at least.
I'm on the side that it's a fun game but come on, just look at this designs.
there's really no denying the ripoff lol and then there's yokai watch
Like I would be all over this game more if the art isn't so blatantly a rip off. I don't get why the Palworld supporters are going so hard on denying the rip off. Sure, monsters are based on animals and theres only limited blah blah blah but Lucario is entirely based on human creativity and hours in the workshop. Come on man.
this image going off genuinely makes me lose faith in humanity:
I don't even know where to start at the sheer idiocy of this.
I'm getting way too old for this and the creeping thought if this is where we are all headed bugs me so I'll try not to think about it anymore and enjoy the little things in life. -
@andre it's because you might be just looking at video games performance but Digimon started off as a Tamagochi counterpart (a keychain/small device that you raise a monster with) in 1987, predating Pokemon. The device went on to sell upward of 13-14 million and was a really big thing for kids and young adults in Japan(and some overseas countries). I remember wanting one and I was born in the late 90s (so around the 2000s when I was a kid).
If we are talking solely based on games (Digimon World on PS vs Pokemon on GB) then Pokemon left Digimon in the dust. However, if we are talking about brand recognition in the creatures collecting industry (in terms of merc, entertainment), Digimon was the closest rival to Pokemon in the 90s-early 2000s because of Tamagotchi + cards+ TV. Basically, if that one dude decided to go into video games with Digimon, history in gaming might have turned out differently. Or not because those guys at Nintendo were insane but you get my drift. They tried to play catch up later and saw some success but never did stand toe to toe in terms of sales with Pokemon.That and the first TV series had a strong, some might even argue better, reception than the Pokemon TV series. Pokemon aired first but Digimon was a surprise at how tightly paced and written the series was compared to I'll-run-this-for-decades Pokemon. And then it starts to falter until it became sad(which is today).
There's a reason why the Digimon movie based on the first tv series was hyped up. -
@zeltrax225 said in Palworld:
I don't even know where to start at the sheer idiocy of this.
I'm getting way too old for this and the creeping thought if this is where we are all headed bugs me so I'll try not to think about it anymore and enjoy the little things in life.I have similar thoughts, and it's wild to see so many people come out to argue like:
- "it's moral to steal from a bad company"
- "it's not plagiarism because it's not 1:1"
- "pokemon didn't create the concept of [animal]"
- "there's 1000 pokemon, you're bound to overlap"
- "nintendo/pokemon fanboy bootlicker lmao"
A lot of the same parroting in different spaces. Did they skip school where they teach you that can't just change some words of an essay and call it yours
This recent video covers this kind of topic too.
I wondered if some of it was also boiling down to whether someone needed to have any artistic bone in their body to understand that you can't stumble into a lot of the same design choices and pretend there wasn't tracing involved.
Do you guys remember when this was a thing?
As a side, one thing I haven't seen in the discussion about the Primarina/Azurobe hair coincidentally having the exact same wisps and bumps is that I think it also coincidentally takes from a shiny Suicune:
(ribbons and dark blue light body palette)
(hair)
(tail bead)
(head and nose shape)
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@Cinder oh yeah I watched that video and loved it. It's one of my favourites and serves as such a study on the insane world of content creators we live in now.
I realize that the world now works on as long as it is viral and has enough attention people will forgive its infringement/copying. Or as long as it fulfills a need. A good example is AI art and how at first, it was sneakily incorporated into workflow and now we have social media accounts that have huge followings creating AI art and people are actively defending it. It's a mess of worms that I don't want to entangle but creative bankruptcy and the lack of morals regarding creativity was inevitable when you consider how sweatshop conditions are for the industry.
I don't remember his name but that Bleach ripoff guy was doing it in the wrong generation. Might find success if he did it now though.
This entire Palworld incident ironically made me respect the Pokemon art team more and their creativity toward creatures design. I mean, I still hate the new DLC mons for SV but can't really argue that 50-60% of Pokemon designs are still pretty creative and continue to be.
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@zeltrax225 said in Palworld:
I don't remember his name but that Bleach ripoff guy was doing it in the wrong generation. Might find success if he did it now though.
Wasn't that Gene Simmons' son?
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@Md-Martin oh that's right. which made it even worse. still a funny situation all around though.
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I think I audibly gasped when I saw this, LOL
Details here: https://www.eurogamer.net/palworld-hides-an-unreleased-familiar-looking-pal-creature-in-its-code-fan-says
Here's a couple things I came across to brighten the mood around the discourse:
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It's so painful to see art and creativity being spit on and the entire bankruptcy of it being celebrated like this.
Thank god I got that Business degree instead of chasing my passions holy shit.