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Is Palworld a “dead game”? Who cares, says the game’s developer
(arstechnica.com)
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
Checked SteamDB, it says the online players are between 20k and 50k, and it's summer (meaning everyone is out and about).
How does one take these numbers and proclaim a game dead? It's like 30th in the overall Steam Chart for number of online players.
Line must go up. If line doesn't go up, it's dead. It can't go down, and it can't level off, either.
It's an unhealthy approach to anything. Things will level off eventually. Palworld's initial hype was never going to last, but if it settled into a nice plateau that let the devs pay their bills, that's fine. The giants of the industry consider such a thing to be failure, but fuck them. Players shouldn't buy into that mindset.
I think a lot of people are preoccupied with the optics of not being HUGE and receiving frequent updates or losing a lot of players. Especially people who grew up with games that didn't really have a lot of competition for their time or were decent jumps over their competitors. Halo 2 came out, and EVERYONE was playing. There wasn't any real competitor. Nowadays, survival crafters are a dime-a-doze.