How Palworld Conquered Steam

hats off to him 19 million players in 2 weeks can't be wrong right pal world has absolutely taken the World by storm it demands attention and now that the initial dramas have been dismissed and people have been able to sink their teeth into the game's full design and full progression the player numbers just keep on growing cuz that's the thing if this was a meme game that exploded people would just wander off afterwards that is not what's happening this game is showing staggering retention which is super impressive so then what is the secret that's allowed a tiny Japanese Indie team to somehow sweep the industry off their feet well today we're going to go through everything this game has got in its favor we're going to deal with a little bit of the sort of postanalysis of the initial discussion around the game and of course that Nintendo are apparently looking into things and of course we can put the research time in and do the analysis without your help or the help of course of today's sponsor you and your fellow viewers at bell. ghost.io seriously you guys are helping us out a lot and in return for your support over there we've got loading screen our daily newsletter that keeps you up to date on everything going on early access to our videos Early Access to our research reports we've also set it up so there is a free trial um whenever you sign up there as well so you can have a little bit of a gander around to see what's up it is the single best way that you can support our Channel it seriously makes a massive difference and even just seeing you guys chat and hang out over at the members Lounge Discord honestly that's just really cool by the way for that you get your invite right after you sign up so thank you for your support and with that said let's go okay then let's jump into where we left off so in the last video we discussed a lot of the accusations that were being leveled against the game and how each one of those accusations could be debunked as an example the uh you know what people were saying about AI now there was the possible exception of Base models being copied and uh even then it would have been hard to prove without a shadow of a doubt now a degree of misinformation has been spread on this story the original claimant did not admit to altering the model in their accusation a lot of people went to our video and said hey they actually manipulated the model and uh you know they they changed what it looked like to uh you know to look similar what they did is they linearly scaled the model to be the same size so the pal and the Pokémon were at the same scale so that the model itself could be compared uh so essentially that is what they did that ultimately is the situation that it wasn't like they added you know new geometry or they changed geometry so that the pal would match the Pokemon they just had the two of them match scale which of course does facilitate the comparison and you could say would make things uh more uh obvious again that's the sort of thing we can probably you know do that kind of mixture of straw man and Steelman to sort of compare uh you know compare both anyway that's what went on but then of course what was interesting is Nintendo actually did step into the ring this I would say is very likely because Nintendo basically had so much noise so Nintendo released a statement and their statement can essentially be summed up as them saying that they know about pal world that they will investigate anywhere they think there will be copyright infringement PS please we we get it already you don't have to tell us anymore that pal World exists of course if you're Nintendo and Game Freak you're probably also aware of pal world's existence in more ways than uh just oh some models are similar some designs don't feel the most inspired and again Pokemon even being you know inspired by other things or having great designs that's been a whole discourse within the Pokemon Community I would certainly hope they take the right lesson from this and that they are inspired to maybe do better now of course after a massive hit like this happens people try to work out why the hell it happened so let's actually deal with this success number one 19 million players and if you're thinking it's just just Game Pass nope 12 million copies have been sold on Steam this is as of January 31st undoubtedly that number is up potentially by a few more million which is mad so 12 million in Steam 7 million in Xbox and that is of course Xbox game pass we don't have a breakdown between Game Pass and people who have bought it on Xbox that is amazing now there's another Survival game out there it's called enshrouded we've talked about it as another Early Access Survival game that is achieving a nonpor uh level of success they are similarish I mean they're in a similar genre they have similar release window similar prices and they both did land their marketing and review cycle fairly well pal world was obviously the main stay of game showcases and shrouded well it benefited from Steam nextfest both games are ones taking a familiar formula and trying to put their own spin on it and they're both from Studios that have got multiple projects under their belt and it's actually not like in shrouded got completely destroyed I mean some could have worried that ined really would have been negatively hit now you could say that more people would have played in shrouded if it came out on its own um of course you know it's it's hard to disprove something that hasn't happened what I can say is no doubt that developer will be very happy because they have sold 4 million copies of in shrouded in only a few days now yes pal world has Eclipse nearly five times that figure and in terms of raw sales and steam it's got triple that but uh when you're you know when you're putting an M after the number and you're dealing with millions of sales I think 4 million is something you can be extremely happy with indeed 4 million is you know that's outselling many high budget AAA games so critics wise well both games aren't perfect but we are looking at you know a 73 top critic average for enshrouded a 69 for pal world with less recommendations for poor but there I would say that there's a little bit of a difference between the critic playing something and saying okay I'm going to play this I'm going to analyze what it's like both of these games you can say are a solid 7 out of 10 basically Bally now of course there's loads of seven out of 10s that I won't touch cuz I won't be interested in them a lot of people would say that Arc is a bit of a s out of 10 game uh you know with all of its Jank but people still love it and play it I think that's basically the thing something can be a seven out of 10 critical hit and a 95% hit on Steam because a player saying I'm happy with my purchase or I'm not happy with my purchase in Steam is very different to a Critic giving something a rated score as an example that's why Rotten Tomatoes and Metacritic will be fairly different looking for so many films ultimately then these are both what you could call hyper successes but to call them both hyper when pal world has got so many more sales it almost reminds me of the situation with Hyper coasters over in roller coaster land where there's so many hyper coasters that people are like okay we're going to invent the Giga coaster and then we're going to go for the strata coaster so I suppose well going to call pile World a a strata success and oud it a hyper success now to go into the external factors then there are some relevant things so pal world and pocket pair have got a good relationship with with Xbox this is one that has of course resulted in the biggest third party game launch of the year and it's a special relationship that's actually now getting them faster patches and additional support of course Xbox are seeing it's winning and they want their players on Game Pass to have a great experience so it was on Game Pass at launch it was across the Xbox consoles it was also by the way on the Xbox one that's many different eyeballs that of course in shrouded wasn't able to get then there's that pocket pair as a company have already delivered this type of game to a happy audience as an example craftopia exists and it's still in Early Access there's a built-in fan base there and the company has had experience actually doing a game like that uh I mean in fact there are many sort of farming Factory SL you know slave labor memes that um also do apply to the marketing of like that game but instead with Zelda like Monsters and the success of that also meant they were able to spend more money in development here the CEO's blog States this quote it's not known how much money it cost I don't even want to see it judging from Kamp Topia sales it's probably around a billion yen that's $6.7 million because all that money is gone I mean that that is uh that is pretty much an ilu uh approach to uh Company accounts it's like huh what was the budget of the game I don't know but about $7 million has gone so I suppose we could say it's that okay um then of course it's got an approachable premise and a art style on the surface right um Patrick kic of crossplay kind of real iiz that this is a game that would actually sell the kids pretty damn well quote I like that it's all the games that I like combined it's like fortnite and Minecraft and sea of Thieves with Pokemon it's got the graphics of sea of Thieves the building exploring of Minecraft and uh from fortnite it's got the glider it's got the guns quote Maggie 10 years old the idea there being that to a lot of that younger audience that doesn't have all of our experience and isn't looking at it with that cynical analytical uh sort of critic's eye well they're just going to see a mass up of everything they think is cool in one place is a kid going to think like you know the artistic cohesion of this pal holding a realistic AK-47 they're not going to look at that and think it's a problem they're going to go ha gun cool fun and that's kind of how it works and this idea mashup of things that people like well we just talked about that recently with the uh success air quotes of the day's marketing where the day before was saying hey we know you've liked the last of us we know you like the division we think you would like the driving mechanics of splint tires and hey here's yoga pants and Lambo because you all like GTA online as well and obviously that led to it being the most wishlisted game in Steam the difference here is that with palor the plan actually worked the game came out and people could play it as well po world's a better game Than People expected I mean I remember when it was more of the days of just like oh you know Meme game is exploded and you know I walked into the shop one of the guys at the shop you he's a viy was talking about playing pal world he kept on going on about like the just all of the crazy things like blew his mind that you know this game could do for me it was really interesting I'm like wow it has all of those dungeons it has this it has that what's that about human me all of that it's crazy unlike the day before it actually delivers some would even say it overd delivers on its premise so essentially if you already knew about the game it was a bit of a meme people were saying Pokemon with guns people were saying hey imagine Pikachu slavery that's what we're going to do and I mean there is natural mimetic spread there but of course another point of that that's pointed out by uh by aftermath and certainly it rings through with my childhood is that the big super gross gory violent take on something that uh you know is otherwise like appealing to your age demographic when you're younger that catches on do you remember the Happy Tree Friends I remember the Happy Tree Friends I had the Happy Tree Friends on my iPod you know the little was it the iPod mini had the little screen you could play the things um so if you grew up in the 2000s with Happy Tree Friends if you grew up maybe a bit more recently it's maybe five you know Five Nights at fredy's that sort of thing um indeed the whole SCP thing taking off with younger audiences even though a lot of the SCP games like you know they're pretty spooky pretty gory whatever and that makes a lot of sense and we know that the memory sells you know like lethal company Goat Sim all of that and the thing is if a triaa game has any problems well it's already below expectations because it's AAA I mean even I was just listening to uh skillups review of The Suicide Squad kill the Justice League uh game and a lot of us point is like you asked for 100 bucks to play this on day one what the hell did you think would happen and that's basically the point where that game under delivers and disappoints uh pal World being cheaper and you know being Indie and because it's a meme game that likely meaning people had a lower expectation that means that pal world was near perfectly primed to actually surprise and Delight people and it absolutely did another thing that makes a lot of these mimetically potent games uh successful is their inherent streamability this is an absolutely major thing I mean lethal company humongous on streams looking at pal world I mean its viewership is absolutely staggering 59 million hours you know Peak viewers of 433,000 that's beyond AAA average viewers 150,000 that is mad and even when you're looking at the very initial numbers for February they don't represent a humongous fallof you still have Peak viewers of 100,000 and average viewers of like 66 67,000 that is still really strong and compare that to enshrouded it's of course been out for a week less but proportionately it did not hit nearly as hard on the streams even though I mean you could say it did do fairly well and hey they sold 4 million copies more power to them I'm sure they're pretty happy about that and to really drive home how big this is this was in January reaching figures that would comfortably have it sitting at under half of the really major behemoths like GTA 5 that is mad PA of that with a steam algorithm that uh has that at the CH the top of the charts of course also it's a genre that does super well you have the most natural virality that you could uh really possibly possibly see for a game now with that then who's actually playing pal world this is where it's interesting so 19 million people means a lot of people have tried it now we already know from the crossplay post that is appealing to all ages but thanks to game discover Co we can actually work out a little bit more so here are steam owners by country and you can see a third of that is China the game is actually owned by more people in China than in the United States and that makes a lot of sense just look at the populations then next up you're looking at Germany France Canada Japan UK Korea Brazil Australia Russia Hong Kong fascinating when you actually look into it for games like this now this data was from Steam on the 24th of January assuming that it's a broadly proportionate thing though and applying that to our 12 million figure that means it sold about 4.37 million copies in China just over over 2 and a half million in the UK yeah pretty damn big and if you look at the Steam Reviews you can actually filter by language you can see um you know your language for us would be English you're dealing with 82,000 reviews all languages though is 191,000 reviews so you're really seeing that this is just appealing worldwide I think that does make a hell of a lot of sense like the sort of cute Pokemon style characters they play really well globally now of the 12 million not everybody's actually played the game and this is where steam achievements can be really G for doing tracking because the beginning of the legend uh steam achievement is for capturing your first pal that is pretty much like one of the first things you'll be doing in the game it's the whole conceit of the game so with that we can pretty much say that 83.1% of the people of that 12 million have um picked up the game and played now of course it doesn't matter to pocket pair they're getting paid either way and with all of this well i' I've got a funny analogy that I just kind of cooked up in my head well it's a little bit like some parts of old blizzard old blizzard would make things approachable and then have a legendary level of Polish obviously that legendary level of Polish is not something you see here but the idea of making those things approachable and then putting them into a game like this has meant that they've been able to harness the inherent strengths of so many other video games without suffering from of course the complexity of some of those games I mean I have a little bit of a philosophy now this philosophy comes from playing Minecraft with teet when I was a kid but basically if you add in Industry Automation and those things into your game I guarantee you will cause damage to me and I will play it more there's something about that Loop there's digital crack to me and that's really one of the things they've been able to successfully do here so let's actually dive into it then survival games can be very intimidating if you're a newer player I mean there's the inherent Jank but of course PVP elements that exist in say a rust or an arc right that can lead to a lot of griefing a lot of that stuff I mean bad things happening when you're not on your server pal world doesn't have that it has zero PVP and by default lets people lock their base down so that other people cannot uh alter their base and that's also something that enshrouded does uh it's got a co-op approach to Worlds rather than basically allowing for combat early on and what this does is it de risks the earlier hours of the game it lets people settle in and uh it's I mean the opposite of if you've ever heard the idea of like the you know the Eve online learning curve where it's just a vertical line a lot of that is kind of like the the opposite here you could also Imagine a sort of anxiety curve that exists in games and I think these are both games that have a way lower anxiety curve than of course with pal World well that drisking of things is kind of happening more and more because very early on your pals are doing a lot of busy work for you that's really cool now it's a primer for the complex industrial gameplay that will happen later on uh but in the first few hours well what it means is you feel a great sense of Freedom you let them go and work which is inherently satisfying you go you explore you see the world you catch more Pals and then after you've essentially and maybe this is almost taking some of the ideas of an extraction based game the idea of you know there's you know your base stuff's kind of successful there you're setting up your little micro industry then you go out you bring all the loot home you then build up your base more it's a very very fundamental session based gameplay Loop that works even Suns of the forest is doing something similar here where it's got an NPC who can do things for you but in the case of that game the NPC has got to be a bit more player directed whereas here the player can step in but otherwise the pals just get to work you know kind of autonomously so what that does is it removes a lot of the TDU and busy work for the early hours of a game like that and I think it allows people to more smoothly get to where the game systems and complexity are really going to be driving that like longer term Buy in right that longer H you know just like tail for the game which is something that we've seen in those steam numbers which have stayed remarkably high for a long time and then of course it's just every system every mechanic and P world has appeared in another video game and this is something the critics will generally be a little bit more harsh over because it's not really that Innovative in what it's doing but you can be Innovative in how you bring otherwise you know sort of normal things together like a lot of people would say again it's like the handy example with apple what do Apple do do they invent things uh I mean sometimes sure but you know core features it's probably appeared in a Samsung phone a few years ago but what the Apple approaches is to oh bring it together in a way that will just be polished usable and integrated so really just because something isn't super Innovative that doesn't mean that people won't like it in fact there are times where it can help this is where I can just go to the experience of Connor so there's four team members working on this channel uh specifically of us he's the one that's put like by far the most into pal world and like yeah he ran into some problems ran into some bugs ran into mechanics and the thing was though he was able to overcome those bugs so they weren't necessarily much of a problem and for a lot of those other mechanics well they were fairly easy for him to understand because he'd already seen them in other games so while you certainly you will lose some points for not being as Innovative what you do actually get is easier access to a larger market because people are already used to what your game is doing that means instead of being lost or confused what they're going to be focusing on is what can I do in this game how can I express myself via these mechanics that I already understand and that is a massive superpower for a game like this and I suppose finally there is the Pokémon angle one of the things that I think P world would have been able to trade off is not Pokemon on guns or with guns that's like the kind of meme thing but it is a large amount of dissatisfaction that exists with Pokémon so many people want to love Pokémon but obviously uh you know at least a visual level often very disappointing I will say actually archus was way better than I thought I mean archus looks ridiculous it should not look like that you can get better out of a switch but I actually thought it was in terms of like core gameplay probably modern Pokemon at its best but even that the bar's not particularly High um because at best what pal world is is an auto battler where you're T taking like Direct Control of some of the characters a little bit more similar to like say an archus um but the core like party RPG gameplay is absolutely not uh you know it's not the same so then you might think well why are so many reviews just calling this you know the the Pokemon that uh you know players deserve or you know why are game freak not making this and honestly it's a pretty damn simple thing you could say the people have went to the hardware store and wanted to buy a milkshake they're not going to get what they want from the store that they're going to and in this case that store is game freak essentially what's happened right is Pokémon fans have wanted Pokémon to grow with them rather than stay the same and always be targeted at that younger age group now I'm not advocating for you know an 18 plus R-rated Pokemon with blood no not at all but maybe the point there that you keep it being a game that everybody can play but you allow for you know a bit more of that complexity you actually just try to you know be more Innovative um but ultimately it's that lack of innovation within Pokemon that has has fundamentally held it back the thing is though because the fan base has been so dieh hard game freak have not really been punished for their lack of innovation certainly I I mean I like the direction that archus is going in I wish that scarlet and violet had more archus like game playay instead of trying to merge archus with the older sort of combat design of a more traditional Pokemon game but I think that's basically the thing like why did Pokemon spend so long in 2D even when spin-offs had moved to 3D why did they not try to push the envelope why did they not try to expand what Pokemon was so that whenever people are maybe you know say 25 or 30 and want some more Pokémon they can have something that they would like instead of something that is you could say overly targeted to 10-year-old now obviously this is not excusing like performance issues or any of that that either you know power world or Pokémon have but for me it's just that core thing of like what does an audience actually want and how is the holder of the intellectual property able to like meet that demand that's an interesting thing across many companies who hold intellectual property some of which you may enjoy quite a bit but then don't do a good job of giving us things that we want the success of pal world is it's bringing everything together and it is giving people something that will be of interest to them if they enjoy Pokemon but something that Pokemon thus far has fundamentally not been interested in providing them and that's why I don't play Pokémon I have not played Pokémon in a very very long time I used to love Pokémon as a kid but what happened is they kept on making Pokémon and you know I bought X and Y um I bought the ones that were the Hawaii inspired place as well the Hawaii one it's like it was such an extended tutorial for like the first hour and a half oh my God the games were so boring there was no innovation I mean yeah there' be a thing that's different like Dynamax but I never felt like they were interested in making a game that I would enjoy even though back in the day I would have been buying all the Pokémon games and when I look at this would I enjoy palor more than what a modern Pokémon entry is yeah because it's got Automation and Base building in it and I love factorio I love playing Tech it I really want to play satisfactory it's got those elements that I know I like I think really we we can Now understand why palor was so successful um certainly we could understand how it uh you know it's some of its principles could be emulated and perhaps improved upon and I think we also understand really the massive missed opportunity that uh that is there with game freak game freak have gotten away with murder because of the strength of the Pokémon brand I don't know if this will change anything but I would at least hope that this is a wakeup call that a Pokémon game that is more different to like a traditional Pokemon RPG than scarland violet is that's way more different that's trying a different type of gameplay that is something that people would really like like what is a Pokémon uh ranching farming or whatever game going to be like I mean could you could actually see so much potential there if you were to do a Pokemon farming game like the sorts of Pokemon that could help you uh run your farm all the things that you could do in a game like that it would probably do really really well of course Market validated by the likes of you know your staru valleys and uh you know having some of your automation gameplay in there with the Pokemon you could just evidently see that actually working you could see a more like Co you know combat uh Focus you know y yada yada but they've just been fundamentally uninterested in doing it and I mean some games have just been living memes and they've came out there's also that so there you go that's the situation look there's a lot that can be learned from this and uh as much as I think there are some creative critiques that you can make of palor it would be very unwise to not look at it to not analyze it and to not try to work out why is it successful why is this actually the end of the day bringing people Joy which is ultimately what our job as game creators should be so that's it for this video check out this one next pretty much doing daily content so hit that sub button with that said thank you very much for watching and I'll see you over there

Channel: Bellular News

Views: 57,469

Keywords: palworld, palworld sales, palworld guide, palworld steam, palworld review, palworld game, bellular, bellulargaming, bellular news, game industry, industry news, videogames, gaming news, game news

Id: PyrHYYVdZ0Y

Length: 25min 21sec (1521 seconds)

Published: Fri Feb 09 2024