Mengchen Cressy from Wafei Temple
量子位 | 公众号 QbitAI
6 million copies were sold in 4 days, and the popular game "Phantom Beast Palu" was online at the same time, reaching the top directly.
This result can even rank second in the entire history of the Steam game platform, and even the platform's own ace CS2 has been squeezed down.
At the same time, the player praise rate is also as high as 93%.
Why is "Phantom Beast Palu" popular and popular?
Drawing on the collection of magical creatures from Nintendo Pokémon, the "world's most profitable IP", it is stitched into more open-world gameplay, satisfying the dreams of players around the world for many years.
Players can collect hundreds of phantom beasts in the huge world, and there are all kinds of gameplay such as exploration, combat, production and construction, breeding and hatching.
There are also many players who have experienced the rare fun of "being a boss".
For such a phenomenal hit game, the production team only had 4 people when the project was first established, and the entire developer company had more than 40 people.
So how did such a huge game scale and hundreds of phantom beast images come about, which has aroused everyone's doubts, it won't be a Pokémon image copied by AI manuscript washing, right?
In particular, the developer Pocketpair also revealed that most of the roles are completed by a fresh graduate, and she has 4-5 times more work efficiency than ordinary people.
After being exposed by artists who care about the copyright of AI-generated content, the comment area directly turned the sky upside down.
There are also many angry players in the gaming community who are calling for refunds.
In addition, the company's CEO is also an aggressive AI supporter, not only promoting the AI process in the company, but even using Stable Diffusion to make a game with the theme of AI painting.
Now the suspicion is even greater.
The stitching is strange, but it is all sewn
In order to confirm the accusation of "paying tribute" to Pokémon to Palu, netizens directly dug up CEO Takuro Mizobe's 2021 tweets.
The AI has evolved so fast that I can't tell which one is the real Pokémon
On the left is an AI-generated Pokémon-like image, and on the right is a real Pokémon image
And just half a year ago, in June 21, Palu's trailer had just come out.
According to this, the netizen who picked up the tweet of the Muru department said that he could not believe that the character in Palu was designed by the team itself.
Not only did the archaeological group make discoveries, but the "Leeuwenhoek" group was also not idle.
After all, such a masterpiece with 5 million sales, if it is suspected of "paying tribute" to Pokémon just because of the overlap in time, it is indeed a bit hasty.
But after careful netizens compared, they found that the characters in these two games really seem to be a bit alike......
A netizen named onion_mu compared the game characters in Palu and Pokémon in detail, and found that many of the former's characters were suspected to be "stitched" from Pokémon images.
For example, the character on the left side of the picture below is a fusion of the body of the Flame Ace in Pokémon, the ears of Ye Yibu, the neck of Wind Speed Dog, and the tail of Fire Ibu......
Even when the image was thrown to ChatGPT, it directly replied that it was a Pokémon character......
The Palu in the picture below is suspected to be a combination of Pokémon Geranium (the color of the main body and the flower on the top of the head) and Miss Skirt (the shape of the flower on the top of the head).
However, this netizen also emphasized that he just took out some details for comparison, and did not say that "Phantom Beast Palu" was a plagiarized Pokémon.
In addition to the characters, the gameplay of "Phantom Beast Palu" is also "stitched", and some netizens made such a meme picture:
Before "Phantom Beast Palu", the company of Musk also developed another game called "Creation Ideal Town", and directly admitted the setting of "stitching" in the Chinese introduction on the official website.
In addition to the information mined from the game, CEO Takbe himself is an avid AI enthusiast.
He retweeted AI-generated pictures and followed Lao Huang's latest developments...... It even means that in about 30 years, the public's perception of intellectual property itself will change dramatically.
In the future, the term "illustrator" will refer specifically to AI, but when referring to humans, "analog (non-digital) illustrator" and "human illustrator" will be added.
Just as the meaning of the word computer has changed from "a person who specializes in computing" to a computer.
At the same time, Musk also founded a cryptocurrency company, which increased the distrust of netizens.
With the continuous digging of netizens, they also found a long article published by the company's account three days before the game's release, describing more legendary experiences in the development of "Phantom Beast Palu".
The CEO revealed his legendary development experience
Takuro Takoro Takibe has been a long-time Nintendo fan for many years, and has also participated in Nintendo's game seminars to develop DS handheld games.
(Therefore, he was nicknamed "Nintendo Rendest" by netizens)
After graduating, he joined JP Morgan, but didn't like the job and left soon after to start the game studio Pocketpair.
They had a relatively successful game before Palu, but they never expected it to be like this.
Due to the fact that other employees still have to maintain the old game, the new project was initially developed by only 4 people, but due to various coincidences in the process, a number of god-level employees were recruited, and today's achievements have been achieved.
For example, a convenience store worker with no industry experience with a junior high school education accidentally became an ace animator for Pocketpair.
Shooters are not very popular in the Japanese game market, and it is difficult to find practitioners with experience in shooting game production throughout the industry.
However, a large part of Pocketpair's income comes from overseas, and "Phantom Beast Palu" took shooting as one of the main gameplay methods at the beginning of the project.
The Ministry didn't know where to find the right talent, so he wandered around the Internet like a dead horse doctor. As a result, he really discovered a hidden god.,Usually only send videos of transforming the loading action of various games.。
Although the content of the great god's hair is in English, the only label is Japanese, and after confirming that the other party is indeed Japanese, Tsubube wants to poach this person.
After contacting, I was surprised to find out that Okami is only 20 years old and only has a junior high school education, and he doesn't work in any game or animation company, but he usually works in a convenience store, and making game animation is purely a hobby.
When Tsubube first invited him to join the company, his parents were worried that he had met a scammer.
After some twists and turns, I finally dug people up, and found that I had really picked up a treasure. Eventually, his talent went beyond animating, sound effects and even some of the programming work in game engines.
……
Just like this, Takuro Tsubbe miraculously met more of these excellent employees.
For example, when the company was considering switching its game engine from Unity to Unreal Engine, a 10-year veteran engineer came down from the sky and offered to apply for a job.
After 6 months of development, I suddenly realized that I had to design 20 movements for each of the 100 phantom beasts, and everyone in the company had no relevant experience, and a headhunting company happened to recommend an experienced senior action designer.
The last one is a genius painter who has hundreds of phantom beast designs.
This fresh graduate, who submitted his resume to Pocketpair for the first time, was rejected because his painting style was too unique.
In fact, she applied to nearly 100 companies and was rejected.
Three months later, Pocketpair started recruiting again, and she submitted her resume again, which caught the attention of Takuro Tsubabe, and finally hired her.
As a result, she picked up the treasure again, not only did she draw 4-5 times faster than ordinary people, but she also modified it quickly according to feedback, and she was also familiar with what was popular on the Internet, and she was able to design a popular phantom beast image.
Afterwards, Musk concluded that everything was really very accidental, which created the miracle of "Phantom Beast Palu".
The genius painter who was blinded by 100 companies almost missed it.
If it weren't for the development of an AI-themed game and Genesis Gensokyo, the current team members might not have joined.
All this gave him a sense of joy that "all the hardships he experienced were worth it and not in vain".
……
In addition to the story being exciting enough, there is also a key detail mentioned in this article, the second application of the genius artist was in February 2021.
According to the first trailer of the game released by the company's account, many phantom beast images have been designed in June 2021.
At that time, AI painting was just getting out of the level of "mental pollution", and the resolution was not high, and only a few AI researchers were playing, and it was unlikely to be used in a real production environment.
△上古AI绘画工具The Big Sleep
Although the possibility of adding AI later in development has not been ruled out, there is no direct evidence that AI was used in Palu, and Forbes also concludes that.
Let's not evaluate their behavior of stitching gameplay, but at least this miracle is more of a miracle of human beings.
One More Thing
At present, it is still unknown whether there is AI involved in "Phantom Beast Palu".
However, many game developers have already begun to introduce AI into their works, such as NetEase's AI-driven NPC system in its game "Against the Cold".
NVIDIA and others are also trying to use large models to allow game NPCs to communicate freely with players outside the script, and have successfully used AI to make a set of scenes in "Cyberpunk 2077".
In the face of these new realities, the Steam platform has also introduced new AI rules that require developers to disclose AI usage, ensure that there is no infringement, and this information will also appear on the game store page.
(There is no disclosure on the Palu store page, and if AI is used, it would be a violation of the rules of the Steam platform.) ）
The gaming industry is rapidly adapting to the changes brought about by AI, and there is no doubt that more and more AI will be involved in Pocketpair's next game, and even the next big hit in the entire gaming industry.
……
The latest news, Pocketpair's new work has just released a trailer, a side-scrolling action game that combines meat pigeon + Metroidvania + construction + multiplayer, with a special emphasis on the level is automatically randomly generated.
Many netizens said that they had a glimpse of "Hollow Knight" + "Dead Cell".
He's still sewing......
Reference Links:
[1]https://twitter.com/invert_x/status/1748930633970389245
[2]https://twitter.com/onion_mu/status/1748108600935919688
[3]https://note.com/pocketpair/n/n54f674cccc40#33883a37-8fdb-4f0d-ab06-853c8aa8be4a
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