Kayin

Kay

@Kayin

Digitial Demon Girl

Gendermongrel Game Dev who is terminally horny and needs to log off. Creator of IWBTG and Brave Earth: Prologue (In theory).

Find me anywhere after cohost closes by looking for kayin, kayinn or kayinnasaki

log inask
Kayin
@Kayin

Palworld being one of the most successful Steam releases and killing the concurrent player depresses me. There are so many things about it that I should be fine with. Copying other games to put your own skin on it?? Sweet. You literally didn't know how to model or rig because you only made asset flip games previous? Sweet. Playing legos with entire styles of games to make something new??

And yet seeing how it looks so clumsy, so un-opinioned and uninspired, so sloppy and basic, just taking the most popular things out there and, at least with outward appearances, smashing the them together and then have THAT not just SUCCEED (which would be fine) but be the most successful steam launch in history or whatever???

I think what depresses me most is I feel like 10 years ago was peak of The Indie Bargain. You got games cheap, but, almost as if a side cost, it was going to be a little weird. Maybe you wanted a pokemon clone, but this one is gonna have it's own twist. And those games could make an okay living because no one was making indie games who wasn't crazy. While you could make a lot of money if things worked out, it's not what you'd do if making money was your GOAL. That sort of value extraction kinda got jailed away on phones.

"Yeah you're gonna play my weird poop roguelike because what are you going to do, spend 60 dollars on a AAA game?"

One half for me is selfish. As an indie dev I WANT to be able to be selfish, to not pander, to get more latitude in what I make because of the cost saving offer. The time when the market wasn't flooded let you hold people hostage. You could get someone to actually play something like I Wanna be the Guy. But also I'm just sad cause I want weird shit to win.

This isn't Palworld's fault. Hell, the game, for all I know, despite all the red flags and quality indicators might be good and fun and I blame no individual person for it and I don't blame the devs for trying to do something. But what it says about the market? idk, it kills me. "Weird Indie" has been hurting for awhile and this isn't going to be what kills it but it's just a brutal reminder of how artificial the conditions of the initial indie boom actually were.

You must log in to comment.

in reply to @Kayin's post:

Fachewachewa
@Fachewachewa

The second paragraph is exactly where I'm at. Also it's not just taking the most popular things out there, it's doing that for the third time. At least their next game is Hollow Knight but roguelike multiplayer with farming sim elements...

It really feels to me like the lesson to take away from this is "stop trying to make anything personal, and if something fails just make it again, but as such an obvious and silly ripoff that people will call it a parody, and it'll sell unlike any other game"

I found Craftopia fascinating a few years ago, because it stole from everywhere without any kind of apparent goal or vision, but seeing how Palworld seels I'm just thinking "wait, stop, this was supposed to be silly fun, not something that'll dictate how the next decade of gaming goes". Also it's on freaking gamepass, it wasn't even a week ago when people were acting like sub services were a danger to gaming.

And I'd be curious to know how actually indie PocketPair is. I can't find any info about them, I don't see credits anywhere. Afaik it could be like the devs behind The Day Before (aka alternative reality Palworld) where the studio is two dude and everything else is outsourced.

login to reply
polarbair
@polarbair

I await a breakdown of the palworld models by some content creator because certain models look like they're just made from parts of existing Pokemon. Like, the pink sexy lizard is Salazzle's head on Greninja's body. One of the mons is just Meganium's face on Goodra's body. It just keeps going.

The dev publicly experimenting with AI generating fakemon and not knowing what a rig are makes it sound downright reasonable tbh

login to reply
polarbair
@polarbair

What really gets me is that the game doesn't even commit to the horror of it. You shoot Pokemon with guns and make them work on assembly lines but it's all got no impact. This concept would've been more shocking and fun as a flash game on newgrounds lmao

login to reply
Kayin
@Kayin

Yeah I wanna give a lot of slack because my pains are unrelated to the validity of the game itself and I don't want anyone grilling me on it for now doing more research. Like there was a period where, not knowing any better, I assumed Genshin had way less of it's own identity than it actually does and while I don't think Palworld has a CHANCE of being in that tier... I'm just... watching my butt.

login to reply
polarbair
@polarbair

I'm saying! If I can get the greatest part of the experience of playing your game just from watching the trailer, the actual game probably isn't that good.

After you get past giving Pokemon guns it's another boring game where you craft shit that doesn't matter or change how you play. The thing that's infested AAA games already, like that Suicide Squad everyone's dunking on lol

login to reply
clockler
@clockler

It's hard to articulate because no single thing it does is wrong, but in aggregate, it's so clearly cynical in nature. I couldn't quite put my finger on it so I had to validate my bias.

From very brief digging, the CEO of PocketPair came from fintech, basically (graduated, JP Morgan Securities, founded ResuPress which made a site for publishing fiction(?), ResuPress then became or was subsumed by the crypto exchange CoinCheck in 2014, who lost $530m in a hack in 2018 but he'd left them by then to found PocketPair in 2015). It's notable here that he claims founding involvement in ResuPress and CoinCheck but neither are confirmable - he's called a lead engineer in at least one interview. Unknown if he's lying or was excised. Anyway, he's excited for AI because it can be used to circumvent copyright, which isn't necessarily a red flag because IP is not inherently respectable, but he's also excited about games driven by GPT-4 (sources - the GPT-4 one is responding to a joke tweet about an "AI" remark in a Dragon Quest 4 commercial) - I heard tell of some NFT promotion on one of their games' twitter, too, but nobody said which or when, so that's on someone else to verify if they care. His history and views say to me that he cares about selling it, not about making something for the sake of making it. He's explicitly a Line Goes Up guy and the game is a living rendition of its own elevator pitch, a Product to be sold as much or more than it is a Game to be played.

You can see the credits for the game on their site, which has 107 people directly affiliated (including discord mods, community staff, i.e. not only direct development staff if you're looking to measure developmental effort put in or estimate costs). The CEO is also credited as the director here, confirming his creative involvement.

Don't take this as journalism, I'm just a hater. Anyway, it certainly is sad that millions of people paid $30 to like a tweet reading "haha what if pokemon had guns wouldn't that be fucked up". I'm actually pretty confident the game is fun in spite of any jank, I quite like surviveycrafteys, but I just can't switch off the part of my brain that wants to read books with "neoliberalism" in the title enough to give in.

login to reply
Crabbit-Slater
@Crabbit-Slater

out of the loop on this but just watched the trailer and feels like I've been hit on the head.

The red flag for me is how Pokemon-like the pals are? Like, they feel like weirdly close to current Pokemon with not really much of a theme going?

ANYWY- yeah- it kinda comes back to my general beef with marketing in general- particularly the height of EA trailer-bait games that were never finished, and in many cases never intended to be finished.

proceed as follows

  1. wouldn't it be cool if? X
  2. do no more design. just promise every half baked idea you can think of
  3. look at other successful games. copy elements from them without rhyme or reason
    4)squirt onto early access with a flashy trailer
  4. realise development is hard. eventually burn out or quit
    6)enjoy your money
login to reply
Pinned Tags