Let’s talk about the Palworld controversies

I partnered with geology who is sponsoring today's video which means we'll have an ad from them somewhere in the middle I've tried to record this video multiple times but every time that I do the information is out of date and then I have to record it again we're doing it today I'm putting my foot in the sand okay power world ladies and gentlemen you've probably heard of it is a millennial near you beating up animals with baseball bats and then forcing them as some sort of sick slave labor to make a house welcome to Pal world so this game pal World which is being called Pokemon with guns but is actually much more a Survival Game I would call it Conan Exiles with Pokémon it's much more like Ark than it is like Pokémon functionally is definitely leaning into Pokémon for marketing purposes I mean if you're going to cling on to anybody why not make it the biggest uh brand of all time Pokemon is the biggest media brand ever it's so godamn big I say unsurprisingly with my gados over here and there's like a Pikachu over here and got two Pokémon tattoos I get it but palad is very much taken the Internet by a storm both extremely positively for the creators and extremely negatively for the discourse so if you didn't already know uh from Rock Paper Shotgun here continues to break records with 1.8 million concurrent players on Steam which is the second highest ever ever it's insane in the past 24 hours the peak concurrent Play account reached 1.8 million the second highest of any game on Steam ever it took that spot from counter- Strike 2 and the only game to reach higher is now play unknown Battlegrounds AKA pubg pubg is still pretty far ahead with 3 .2 million and I actually have no doubt that palor will have trouble beating that because it is also on Game Pass the fact that it launched on PC in Early Access and on Game Pass at the same time means it's split across platforms the Xbox achievement hunt a crowd are playing it on the Xbox and that is millions of people it also had an absolutely enormous weekend selling 5 million copies overtaking cyberpunk 2077 in steam's most played games list it's it's nuts this game is so godamn successful and so quickly and with that and with Pokémon fans comes some like extreme a some some Hefty vital people are really upset about this game people were upset with me for playing it and there are a lot of conversations that have come up about the game in terms of copyright or if it's plagiarism or if it's using Ai and the AI one is the one that I first spoke about as far as I can tell the accusation that poal uses AI for its monster designs actually just came from some totally like uncredited random on Twitter who basically just accused it of that there is no evidence at all that the game uses AI in any facet the best link there even is that the studio that makes pal world has previously made a game using AI OD and I hate that we're in a landscape where technically it's possible that they could be using AI in terms of asset generation which don't even get me started on how infuriating the AI conversation is let's just sidebar real quick for AI okay not going to get into the ethics too extensively because the last episode of my podcast which goes on this channel which I have with game director Mike bthl and video game composer Austin wintery we talk very extensively about the ethics of AI in the future but it just sucks so bad that we're now at a point where we don't know if something is AI or not I highly doubt pal world is AI because AI frankly is currently not that good yet and I don't see why the company who has previously advertised a game as using AI seemingly with a head of Studio who is pro AI wouldn't just say that PO weld uses AI but there's no evidence that it does but it just how existentially terrifying that we're already at a point where we don't know if things are AI or not I've been seeing that with people talking about doctor photos from Israel and Gaza they don't know if these photos are AI on it like this is just wow that's horrifying the second thing uh that came out that some of you may have seen was a Twitter thread from somebody who basically compared the palor 3D models to those in Pokemon let me pull that up for you so this account biofog I think they might have changed their username a number of times made videos uh putting models of Pokemon against models from PA and seeing how well their mesh overlaps it says TFW you and your cousin have exactly the same proportions they Then followed up and said I feel a little regretful for using exactly so flippantly here I was trying to be silly but I think it gave an incorrect impression I want to emphasize that while some elements are similar these meshes are not literally exact copies of each other it is time to talk about geology and your skin it's a new year you might have had some resolutions one of them probably should be skincare your Skin's a whole organ and I know it's very complicated if you try to 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was revealed in 2021 if they thought that it was infringing on their copyright which is a complicated Beast I'm so certain that Nintendo would have already taken it down they have come out and made a statement uh they said inquiries regarding other companies games you received many inquiries regarding another company's game released in January 2024 we have not granted any permission for the use of Pokémon intellectual property or assets in that game we intend to investigate and take appropriate measures to address any acts and infringe on intellectual property rights related to Pokémon we will continue to cherish and N each and every Pokémon and its world and work to bring the world together through Pokémon in the future the Pokémon company Rock Paper Shotgun actually spoke to a lawyer about this one and there are a few takeaways in this article it's really interesting I'll leave a link in the description but um ultimately cotton the lawyer that they spoke to said that he thinks Pokemon and Pals are sufficiently different that there's no problem because they do look different in pretty much every way I mean it's you know I have a lot of criticism of of game freak and the way that they make games I think it's absolutely absurd that Pokemon is the highest grossing franchise and that I love Pokemon and that I spent a lot of money on Pokémon and that at the same time despite that tremendous amount of income and that they keep making money off of me they still release games that don't function look leagues behind every other game even on Nintendo hardware and they're just hideously ugly like it is inexcusable to me that you can make that much money and be that successful release the amount of games that you do and have the quality be as low as it is and and the problem is that we keep buying them right that's the problem and realistically part of the reason that nobody is going to be confusing pal world for Pokemon is kind of the pal world looks better which is crazy game freak really be up to some business so obviously there are some Pals that are very very similar to Pokémon some that I think are stretches people are comparing these two things I mean I'm calling them in game the one that looks like zerus I called not zerius the one that acts like a Flareon I called not Flareon I think it's called like Firefox or something something but there are some that it's like oh you copied it cuz it's a snake no it's just a snake that's how snakes look you know what I mean uh there is no world in which the game Studio who is making this who has a previous game that is so clearly just a ripoff of breath of the wild is even trying to hide that this is plagiarism and it is a thing that power world should be criticized for I think two things can be true at once one game frequently needs to get their [ __ ] together and that I am sort of hoping that the one outcome of this will be that game freak and the Pokémon company on Nintendo go oh wow we have some ual competition for the first time in our entire lives maybe we do need to improve the quality of our games archus very easily could have been a lot more like something like power something that actually molded the genre it is a unique game they made some changes I like Aus I had a lot of fun with it but it doesn't push the Pokemon formula I think quite as much as that I hoped that it would in a way that something like poal is an entirely different experience I mean poal is again it's mostly con and Exiles it's mostly Ark but it's also got some Zelda and it's got some Pokémon and it's got some Elden ring as well kind kind of with the boss ENC count is and again I don't think they're hiding that any plagiarism exists and I don't think this is a positive I do think the power world should be criticized for doing this and I think that they should adapt and change they should take that criticism and go okay let's get rid of the ones that have clearly just copied designs and come up with our own Unique Designs like that pressure is good that is one of the main things worth criticizing the game for even though it's currently in Early Access it's also pretty buggy there are facets of the gameplay Loop that I find very moring there are things worthy of criticism plagiarism is one of them also as an aside I feel like we always just pretend that Pokemon was the first one to come up with Pokémon have you heard of Dragon Quest Pokemon didn't even invent the Pokemon formula even the card game magic the Gathering is is just is Pokemon is directly copied from Magic the Gathering all of this to say truly I don't actually know how I feel about po weld currently I don't know what my current opinion is on this I feel like I need to like sit with it for longer I do think it's a pretty solid Survival game that does a lot of very smart things that people are probably going to enjoy for longer I don't think this is going to be dead in 2 weeks as the internet is suggesting I do feel like somebody even vaguely appearing as threatening to the Pokémon franchise and thus making game freak have to consider quality a little bit more which I don't even really blame them for to be clear like I don't even really blame the dev team it's such a publisher problem that when this studio makes so much money clearly on not enough staff and is still forced to release games every year like why would you increase budgets they don't need to we keep [ __ ] buying them I'm a part of the problem and I really do find it like existentially terrifying that we're at a point where I don't know if something is actually AI or not like that that frightens me for mankind like if we can't tell if something politically motivated is real or not information effectively ceases to exist like we don't actually have information anymore you can't verify something through an image or a video which is how we've done it for so long it's it's so easy to fake stuff these days I just find that to be the most terrifying takeaway from this to be honest and I don't think that pocket pair is a good ethical company this doesn't feel to me like one of those situations where it's like oh this Indie Dev worked hard and made something cool and made a bunch of money when you look at the other stuff they've made they have very very clearly tried to copy off of bigger games repeatedly until one of them became a success it's a shitty practice like I'm not a fan of them doing that this is not a company that I'm like super happy for them to be rich which they now definitely are even if I think PO is a pretty solid game there's no innovation here and there's plenty of innovation in the Indie space and of course it makes sense that power world has popped off in the way that it has because of the elements it combines successful marketing you know but it's kind of complicated I've never seen anything like it it'll be really interesting to see if they get sued Nintendo is a very Su happy company in my opinion but I do feel like if they had means to do it they would have already done it and I'm sure they will try as hard as they can to be honest especially considering how exponentially successful power wal has become but I also don't know how that will go and also dear God stop saying you don't like Ai and video games you have to dislike specific kinds of a guy you can't dislike all of it all games have ai

Channel: Charalanahzard

Views: 184,472

Keywords: Alanah Pearce, Funhaus, IGN, Charalanahzard, god of war

Id: rC-JpC4dnpo

Length: 11min 57sec (717 seconds)

Published: Thu Jan 25 2024