Source: Roski
Recently, the popularity of the Steam market has been rising, and the news of "small team + big hit" has been almost every month.
The shock of the single-player 100 million dollar masterpiece "Lethal Company" has not yet dissipated, and a new storm has already appeared.
On January 19th, the open-world multiplayer game "Palworld" (Phantom Beast Palu), developed and released by the Japanese solo game team Pocketpair (formerly developed by "Craftopia/Creation Ideal Village"), opened its "Early Access" on Steam. The initial discount is 10%, and the discounted price is 97.2 yuan in China and 26.99 US dollars in the United States.
This work was announced back in June 2021. Due to the limited publicity resources of the small team, coupled with the impact of "early access" on the exposure weight, the game did not attract much attention before its release.
The community has come to see Palworld more as a meme/meme to satirize Nintendo's rigidity and lack of progress over the years.
But what exceeded everyone's expectations was that it only took a few days for "Palworld" to turn the Steam market upside down, and it became the first dark horse of the year on the PC side by overwhelming the world's best-selling charts.
The sales volume exceeded 1 million in 8 hours, 2 million in 24 hours, 3 million in 40 hours, and 5 million in 3 days...... A series of sales data that used to belong to the top 3A masterpieces miraculously befell this small-budget work.
What's even more amazing is that nearly 10 hours after Pocketpair announced the information of exceeding 3 million sales on the 21st, there are still just over 20,000 reviews on the Steam store page, and the rough sales/review ratio has reached a terrifying 150-180. The traditional Steam review estimation formula has woefully failed.
This kind of "formula failure" situation can only be seen in the first few days of the release of once-in-a-decade blockbusters such as GTA5 and Cyberpunk 2077. The initial speculation is that a large number of players are still immersed in the game and have not had time to comment.
The peak CCU of the game also continued to set new highs with the growth of sales, and exceeded 1 million to 1.29 million on January 21, surpassing the CDPR phenomenon "Cyberpunk 2077", ranking 5th in Steam history and 1st in the history of single-player games, creating history in both growth rate and absolute value.
In front of "Palworld", there are only four big DAU multiplayer products backed by giants, such as Chicken, CS2, Lost Ark, and Dota2.
Due to the rapid explosion of "Palworld", the data of a large number of third-party statistics websites has not been updated synchronously. However, according to Pocketpair's official push information and past product experience, without counting Microsoft's XGP buyout fee, it is already a sure thing that the revenue of Palworld Steam will exceed $100 million in the first week.
Let's dive into the world of Palworld and see what makes it magical.
01 Old elements and new fun
If you take apart the various elements covered by the core gameplay, Palworld doesn't really have any breakthrough innovations.
Pocketpair just borrows and stitches together many proven gameplay methods on the market, and throws them into the market after completing the minimum polishing.
This product idea is in line with its predecessor, Craftopia, which is:
The gameplay focuses on "borrowing + piling up", and the art reduces the cost as much as possible, using 30% of the price of the 3A masterpiece to bring players 200% of the gameplay, 70% of the image performance, and 500% of the content of the 3A masterpiece.
In a sense, Pocketpair has applied the "risk-free arbitrage + sinking market" method of Chinese manufacturers to make in-app games, and applied it to the field of buyout games.
On Palworld's Steam store page, the developers listed all the elements stitched into the game, including survival, exploration (open world), building, sim management, industrial automation, dungeons (dungeons), pet collection and breeding, and multiplayer.
There are all the popular elements on the market, and the main one is full.
Combat elements and survival building elements constitute the two core driving forces in the overall cycle of the game. In the actual gameplay, the two types of elements are nested and influenced by each other, achieving the effect that 1 plus 1 is greater than 2 - the elements are all old elements, but the fun produced by combining them is very novel.
Players can increase their level by collecting new palu to gain numerical pleasure of increasing combat power. At the same time, the more Palu the player has, the more efficient the production and construction of the base will be, so as to obtain the second wave of cultivation pleasure.
Higher levels bring more new technologies, and the new equipment and tools unlocked by technology will in turn increase the efficiency of the player in capturing Palu, thus forming a complete cycle with the above content.
When the player reaches a higher level, a highly automated industrial production line can be implemented with the help of many palu, which will continuously produce the resources that the player needs to help the player conquer stronger opponents.
In terms of battles and collection, "Palworld" as a whole copied the Pokémon's attribute restraint, gender, and personality (passive entry) system, and fine-tuned it according to the needs of real-time combat.
The current version has a total of 111 Palu for players to collect, and each Palu has a corresponding Flash, Boss variant, and its attributes are stronger than ordinary individuals.
Capturing Palu requires the consumption of Palu balls, and the process of throwing the orbs is completely instantaneous. Compared to the process under the Pokémon turn-based conditions, Palworld puts forward higher requirements for the player's on-the-spot reaction.
Blood control, ceasefire, ball throwing, capturing, checking entries - this whole set of cycles happens frequently in the game, which can bring players an inexplicable sense of refreshment, and is the main source of fun in the game's combat level.
Compared with the extremely cumbersome way of catching dinosaurs in "ARK: Survival Evolved", the design of "Palworld" is indeed more accessible.
What's even more interesting is that players can not only play Palu against him as a trainer, but they can also pick up the crafted weapons and participate in them directly, and even equip their Palu with an assault rifle or bazooka to build it into a mobile turret.
Breeding pets to create excellent entries is also an important way for players to create "super monsters", and both combat and production Palu can benefit from it.
Collecting golden entries is a big motivator for players to play in the mid-to-late game.
The echoing cycle of "fight-survival-build" achieves a wonderful resonance. Due to the simple and crisp combat design of Palworld, and the well-balanced ratio of the two different elements, players will not have problems with card resources and card rhythm in the early stages.
This makes the first few dozen hours of the game very enjoyable, and much more fun than ARK: Survival Evolved, Forest, and other games that focus on survival building.
In addition, the game's map is extremely large, on the same scale as Genshin Impact and Elden Ring, or even larger. If a solo player wants to explore the full map, it is conservatively estimated that it will take at least 5 days.
Towers scattered throughout the map (similar to the Gyms in Pokémon) are important milestones in the player's progression. Each time a tower master is defeated, it means that the player's strength grows again.
However, on the whole, the content presence of the narrative and levels in "Palworld" is not strong, and it is just the embellishment of the main mechanism.
During the exploration of the open world, players can ride their beloved Palu while encountering random elements such as treasure chests, Palu eggs, encounter events, and dungeon dungeons on the map.
Unlocking a new waypoint will allow the player to earn tech points, which can be spent to unlock new building and item blueprints.
Powerful bosses Palu will roam their territories, and players can earn Ancient Tech Points when they complete a crusade or capture of them, which can be used to unlock crafting privileges for rare items in the tech tree.
Although Palworld lags behind its genre in terms of visual performance, the series of exploration elements based on the open world can still effectively support and complement the core experience of the game.
Due to the complexity of the content covered in this work, it is difficult to be comprehensive in this article due to the lack of space. It is highly recommended that you play in person to get a more three-dimensional and emotional understanding.
02 An initial team of 4 people creates 6 miracles
On January 16th, three days before the game's launch, the president of Pocketpair published a handwritten letter titled "A Miracle That Decided Destiny in 3 Days". The content of this letter was widely disseminated among practitioners and players after the launch of the game.
In the letter, he believes that Palworld has created 6 miracles with an initial team of only 4 people.
Wonder 1: Since the project leader had no experience in FPS production, the gun part of the game was done by an amateur who worked part-time at a convenience store in Hokkaido, including all the parts such as action, scripting, sound, camera logic, blueprint implementation in Unreal Engine, etc.
Marvel 2: The initial prototype of the game was run on Unity, but the company hired a programmer who could only use Unreal, so the project was migrated to Unreal Engine as a whole.
Miracle 3: Due to the free models and rigs used in the previous game Craftopia, the entire company of Pocketpair has no model and animation production capabilities. At the critical moment of ramp-up, the company was fortunate to recruit an animator who was good at using plug-ins, which set the standard for the subsequent production of action assets for the game.
Miracle 4: When the product was established in 21 years, there were only 10 employees in the entire company. The president set up a prototype team of 4 people and spent 3 months working on a trailer, which received a positive response. As the project progressed, the company realized that it was a large project and that the original one-year construction period was completely insufficient. In the end, the president decided to take a desperate gamble, increasing the company's headcount to 40 people, hiring a lot of outsourcing, and burning more than 1 billion yen (more than 50 million yuan, basically all the money earned from Craftopia) before going live.
Miracle 5: A female graduate who has been rejected by hundreds of companies has completed the original art design of all 111 palu in the game. This fresh graduate draws 4-5 times faster than the average artist, and the feedback and correction speed is also very fast.
Marvel 6: Palworld is a fun game with no real competitors. The way big companies make triple-A games is very limited.
If the contents of this letter are true, then the process of the birth of "Palworld" is almost a remake of "Genshin Impact".
Back then, miHoYo also pressed all the profits earned by the Honkai series, and exchanged a huge gamble for hundreds of times the ROI.
In addition, the letter also explains the roughness and bugs in many details of the game, including but not limited to:
Ground weaving issues: Molding, stuck terrain, PGC vegetation cover errors.
AI Issues: NPCs (including pets and enemies) are sluggish, often standing still or attacking indiscriminately.
Animation issues: character sliding/teleporting, misaligned attachment points for climbing animations, confusing state machine logic, etc.
Rendering issues: Unreal Engine 5's extensive out-of-the-box world-building capabilities are still a mess, with little to no GI and regular lighting optimizations, and performance is guaranteed in a way that reduces the quality of art assets.
And, of course, there's the art style inconsistency. The following official screenshot is very illustrative.
The Palu in this picture has a typical low-poly, stylized treatment, while their machine gun is a standard PBR.
Two sets of assets that appear on the same screen are of completely opposite art standards, which is considered an art accident in a normal project. Pocketpair is likely to not even have the main beauty when promoting the project, and the visual effect is completely "take a step to see one step" and "just use it".
However, these flaws have become insignificant in the face of the word "fun". Players have their own judgment, and the data doesn't lie.
After all, such a small workshop with "all amateurs" can make games, which is already the biggest miracle.
As the popularity of Palworld continues to ferment, players' attention has shifted from the game itself to other places, especially the dissatisfaction with the Nintendo Pokémon IP for many years.
On social media at home and abroad, there are voices of "the world has been suffering Nintendo for a long time", "Dry game Freak", and "Palworld is the funeral of Pokémon", and the attention even exceeds that of "Palworld" itself.
As a player, I feel from the bottom of my heart that Palworld is really fun despite being rough and stitched.
But the commercial society is rational and sometimes cruel. How far Pocketpair can go with this set of "stitching skills" to kill the master is a question worth thinking about more than the popularity of the game itself.
03 If a small workshop wants to become a large factory, it still needs to survive several catastrophes
The fact that the Palworld product itself can stand does not mean that Pocketpair will be able to "upgrade" to a first-tier PC manufacturer. Before reaching the other side, they still have several catastrophes to overcome:
First of all, the predecessor of "Palworld", "Craftopia", has caused a lot of controversy at home and abroad due to excessive borrowing from the IP of many large manufacturers represented by Zelda.
The community's evaluation of Craftopia is highly polarized: one group of people is more moderate in their view, believing that as long as the product is reasonably priced and of acceptable quality, then stitching and plagiarism is not a capital offense and just a fun offense, while others are represented by Nintendo fans who believe that the game is pure electronic waste.
Fortunately, Nintendo, which has strong legal resources around the world, has chosen to turn a blind eye to Craftopia, and has not filed a lawsuit against Pocketpair so far.
According to VGI data, the total revenue of the game has been around $10 million in the more than three years since it was launched. For a giant like Nintendo, there is neither a substantial threat to the business nor a large enough potential litigation proceeds.
But "Palworld" is different from its predecessor, and it is also different from those domestic skin-changing games that play side balls and touch porcelain Pokémon.
Palworld has already advanced to the top 5 in Steam history in the first week of CCU data alone, and the potential user base of the subsequent long-tail is likely to reach tens or even hundreds of millions (counting XGP users).
It's a bonanza worth at least a billion dollars.
What's more, the development process was so haphazard and hasty that Palworld rushed into the softest hinterland of Nintendo's ecology - the Pokémon IP worth more than $92 billion in a way that bordered on a compliance level.
Some argue that the "borrowing" of concepts and gameplay does not constitute infringement in the legal sense, and that Palworld is safe.
The author has reservations about this for the time being.
From a purely commercial point of view, it is unlikely that Nintendo and GF will sit back and watch the swarming imitators conquer the city and turn the "private sea" that was once their own into a red sea. Whether or not the goal is achieved, there is always something to be done to assert existence.
Otherwise, looking at the shouting and shouting of "overturning GF and taking the bird position" in the comment area of "Palworld", who cares about the so-called "majesty of the big factory"?
At that time, everyone will come to get a piece of the pie, and the business advantages brought by IP barriers will be gone.
As a base Japanese solo game manufacturer, the more successful Pocketpair is commercially successful, the greater the compliance risk.
On the other hand, due to the lack of experience in building a numerical system, Palworld has a lot of numerical bloat and balance problems in the late game.
This feeling is especially prominent when experiencing it solo. Some towers take the initiative to have more than 100,000 blood, and it is difficult to kill without teaming;Resource consumption fluctuates too much in the early and late stages、Insufficient high-level automation functions,Disguised increase the liver;After full level + full collection,The game lacks new goals,It's obviously too thin to rely on the support of the construction system alone。
Full real-time combat reduces the difficulty of getting started, and on the other hand, it also reduces the fun of strategy and the longevity of the game. This issue also needs to be weighed urgently.
Since it is still in the "Early Access" stage, there is still a great possibility for the subsequent development of the game. Technical issues such as image performance and performance optimization are not the main contradictions, but gameplay optimization and iteration are the key points that affect the whole body, and also determine how far the game can go.
However, according to Pocketpair's previous product ideas, it is likely that they will choose to continue to accumulate and increase the supply of content - such as expanding the map area and increasing the number of palu, rather than tinkering mechanics.
Compared with "Genshin Impact" with IAP monetization, how should the buyout system "Palworld" solve the old problem of content supply being overtaken by players' consumption, and how to ensure the stability of retention and CCU curve?
Can Pocketpair start a sect with this product and become the next Techland and the next Studio Wildcard?
Is it a pioneer in innovation or a martyr in the war of commerce?
We might as well continue to observe and allow time to answer these questions.