What Palworld's success tells us about 2024's game biz
Let's go a little broader. Also: a new eBook and lots of discovery news.
[The GameDiscoverCo game discovery newsletter is written by ‘how people find your game’ expert & company founder Simon Carless, and is a regular look at how people discover and buy video games in the 2020s.]
We’re back, and we aren’t over being fascinated by the Palworld phenomenon - you too, huh? (It’s now over the 2 million CCU milestone on Steam & has sold 7 million units on Steam in 5 days - with millions more Game Pass players.)
But we do need to talk about other stuff too, hence the jampacked news section at the end of this newsletter, as well as a new eBook we’re rolling out. And for the time being, the floor is yours, Palworld, for just a little more musing…
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What Palworld's success tells us about games…
There are a lot of ‘takes’ on Pocketpair’s smash hit ‘survival x creature collecting’ game Palworld out there. So to start, we wanted to ‘borrow’ a couple on the many feelings this game engenders. One is flippant, and one is less so.
The flippant one? Noclip’s Danny O’Dwyer & friends’ joke ‘90 second video review’ of the game is just a clip from a bigger ‘for fun’ stream. Which - if you don’t have a minute and a half to spare, is:
them making fun of the Zelda: Breath Of The Wild-ish location shift UI.
immediately using the BoTW-style in-game glider (more guffaws) and discussing the “Frankenstein”-like nature of the game.
Danny saying: “You know what’s not in Breath of The Wild, though… just f*cking shooting things!” (Crossbow x ‘Pokemon’ slaughtering carnage ensues.)
unleashing a fire-type ‘Pal’ on a human character, with the crew musing: “Imagine Pokemon, but they can murder humans?”
The other take on Palworld’s cognitive dissonance comes from dev Paul Kilduff-Taylor, who rightly says:
“Palworld situation is really interesting - a very, very significant number of players want things that are *extremely* familiar with a tiny bit of novelty on top, and I think both press and devs sometimes have a hard time accepting this.
…There's obvious questions about levels of technical similarity and so on, but I think even without that some of this ‘discourse’ would have been the same - I've seen a lot of ‘oh it's just the same game again’ stuff and.... that's what a lot of the survival genre *is*”
BTW, his point is 100% reinforced by this week’s big survival game, Enshrouded, which just debuted today to 70,000 Steam CCU (!) - and won’t sell as well as Palworld, but is going to sell a million units easily. People want more of this type of game.
Palworld: a short ‘real Steam data’ interlude…
But there’s something ‘special’ about Palworld. And before we get to discussing it, we thought it’s worth looking at a couple of other game metrics* for it. Firstly, we looked at public Steam profiles, to see which countries are currently playing Palworld:
Probably the biggest standout in here - not sure if expected - is China, at 36.4% of the players. The U.S. has 21.4% of players, followed by Germany (6.0%), France (3.3%), Canada (3.0%) and then down from there. (Oh, and Pokemon’s home, Japan has ‘just’ 2.5% of the players - but its population is less than 10% of China’s, don’t forget.)
Secondly, we looked at which games people were playing more than the median on Steam, if they also played Palworld. Across all games on Steam, For The King II (10.5x more than median) and the dev’s previous game Craftopia (10x) stood out.
But if you look at the games with the biggest percentage of player overlap and also a higher multiple (above), titles like Monster Hunter: World (4.9x, played by 47% of Palworld players), Elden Ring (4.7x, 39%), and Risk Of Rain 2 (5.1x, 34%) are probably most notable - all pretty ‘core gamer’, complex games.
That’s more context on who is actually playing Palworld, at least on Steam. There’s less data on the Xbox/PC Game Pass version, though we estimate there’s been at least 1.5 million downloads of it so far. (Why not more? Probably because China, which is a massive Palworld fanbase, isn’t big on Xbox.)
[*These metrics are not in GameDiscoverCo Plus, and only available to our regular clients right now. But we have longer-term plans to open them up on a premium sub layer.]
Understanding Palworld by ‘knowing’ its creator?
So what have we got so far? Palworld is a massive success because, if we were to paraphrase our two ‘takes’ from earlier:
It’s a very well-made ‘open world survival craft’ title from a team who already shipped one hit, and people love the depth & complexity of those mechanics.
It mashes up - often not too subtly - other major hits into its structure, in ways that make you goggle or marvel, but then still want to play. (Novelty at work.)
But we don’t have to guess at the motivations of Pocketpair’s creators. Nope, you can just read a 10,000 word (!) blog post (Google Translate version) from Pocketpair CEO Takuro Mizobe, published just three days before the game came out.
We read all the way through this - and did check with a Japanese speaker to ensure the machine translation was reasonably sound - and here’s what we spotted:
Palworld is a culmination of a multi-product pipeline from Pocketpair: the Japanese dev has now released four games on Steam: “If it weren't for the phantom first game, which was never released, Overdungeon would not have been born. Without Overdungeon, Craftopia would not have been born. Without Craftopia, Palworld would not have been born.” And in some cases, Mizobe was patching and improving these games every day. Wow - there’s so much iteration & experience created here.
Mizobe is very realistic about the industry’s complexities: he notes at one point, sagely: “The game business is fundamentally a high-risk business. When it's a big hit, you get a big profit, but when it's not a hit, you get very little. Fundamentally, it is a high-risk, high-reward business.” So he’s a realistic guy. (And he just hit the ‘high-reward’ tier!)
Being self-published, this game’s budget was a little bit ‘abstract’: Mizobe admits, after more than 40 extra employees or contractors were hired: “It is not known how much money it cost. I don't even want to see it… Judging from Craftopia's sales, it's probably around 1 billion yen [$6.7 million]... Because all that [money is] gone.”
What’s most interesting is his view on Palworld’s design: “Palworld is definitely a new and innovative game. There's no other game like it. At this point, many people may think that Palworld is just a rip-off game, but in reality, it has a novelty that is… different from BOTW [Breath Of The Wild] and Genshin [Impact].”
He notes that the only Minecraft-esque ‘survival craft’ game that allows you to tame monsters is ARK: Survival Evolved, and then goes through a whole bunch of differences, ending: “Palworld's base building is very unique, taking inspiration from the RTS and Automation genres.”
What’s intriguing here is that Mizobe - who is obviously an incredibly detail-oriented person - focuses super-hard on the actual gameplay specifics, and not the weirdly magnetic surface-level hook (‘Pokemon with guns with some Zelda-y touches!’)
But that’s the underlying reason why Palworld is doing so well! It’s the weirdest combination of an amazingly well-made underlying ‘survival craft’ gameplay loop with a twisted UI/character ‘fast follow’ of major Nintendo franchises like BOTW and Pokemon (some might say ‘heavily inspired by’, some might say ‘semi-ripoff’).
And that’s the reason why it’s making a lot of people in the game biz feel ‘some kind of way’. It’s such a great game, but it’s also strongly ‘borrowing’ from other franchises in a ‘surface visuals’ way that PC/console games generally don’t. But the game, again, is super well-crafted. So we should just celebrate that - right? Right, Anakin?
New on Plus: a ‘zero-budget marketing’ eBook…
So, we’ve just updated our ‘game discovery’ eBooks section with a seventh (!) eBook you can access if you’re a GameDiscoverCo Plus subscriber - and it’s The Zero-Budget Game Marketing Manual from Superstring’s Jamin Smith.
As the book’s blurb explains: “This comprehensive manual - and accompanying materials - shows you how to get your game the attention it deserves with practical, actionable advice, accumulated over twelve years of AAA and indie game marketing experience, with expert advice from industry veterans and game journalists, including Hannah Flynn (Failbetter Games), Thomas Reisenegger (Future Friends Games), Wesley Yin-Poole (Eurogamer/IGN), Gav Murphy (RKG) & more.”
This eBook, originally released in 2020, has a lot of good material on studio branding and product positioning that we haven’t really covered in the newsletter, as well as a hefty separate downloadable with templates for brand plans, roadmaps, press kits, etc.
While we think that some ‘trad marketing’ principles are less easy to apply in today’s often game mechanics/virality-driven market, the eBooks’s insights still seem incredibly helpful to us. Just micro-extracting, here’s a classic marketing funnel:
As the book says: “Moving through this funnel becomes more and more difficult the further you descend. Think about how many games you’re simply aware of. There are hundreds of titles on the periphery of your interest. Some won’t be your thing, but others - with the right push - can tip you down the next layer of the funnel. All marketing activity - often relevant to the different stages of your campaign – aims to take somebody down to the next level.”
Anyhow, this title joins six other eBooks, including three from GameDiscoverCo, the Gamedev Business & Budgeting Handbooks, and Derek Yu’s Spelunky ‘making of’, as benefits for GameDiscoverCo Plus members. Thanks to all for making this possible!
The game discovery news round-up..
Finishing off the week in style - and yes, Footprints.gg’s analysis of ‘trade media’ coverage of games last week (above) is dominated by that darn Palworld, followed by Indiana Jones & Tekken 8, here’s what we spotted:
Sony’s CEO was asked about ubiquitous gaming & subscription models, saying “Wherever there is computing, users will be able to play their favorite games seamlessly” - though Derek Strickland notes this is a comment on the market in general - and musing: “People usually play one game at the time, so an all-you-can-eat [subscription] of many games may not be so valuable compared with video streaming services. We have kind of balanced a hybrid service on PlayStation Network.”
Two great blogs from Roblox/Fortnite UGC expert David Taylor: first, Roblox just hit a record of 9.71 million CCU, and ‘nobody’ is talking about it? Huh. Secondly, looks like Fortnite island creators should be taking heavy hints from Roblox about top-performing types of games - as Fortnite’s UGC tools allow this complexity.
There’s a new editorial store feature on Xbox, ‘ID@Xbox Presents: Indie Selects’ which includes “a curated, dedicated collection in the Xbox Store featuring indie games chosen by the ID@Xbox team – along with support on our social and community channels, and even right here on the Xbox Wire.” Neat!
Sony put out its own chart of the biggest PlayStation games of 2023 by download, and it’s largely as expected - Hogwarts Legacy, Modern Warfare III, EA Sports FC, Spider-Man 2. Elsewhere, Pavlov topped the PlayStation VR2 charts (but, we think, at <10% of Steam LTD sales!), and Fortnite and Roblox (duh) topped the F2P charts.
Microlinks: a good look at which mobile game genres flourished in 2023 - or didn’t; Meta’s Mark Zuckerberg, as part of a ‘hot on AI’ interview, restated: “I don’t know how to more unequivocally state that we’re continuing to focus on Reality Labs and the metaverse“; Netflix is publicly happy [.PDF] re: its Grand Theft Auto Trilogy mobile download numbers, which some estimates have at >18 million.
A new video called ‘Do indie games actually sell on Epic Games Store?’ looks at Epic achievement totals and personal experience to postulate - not much: “If a game sells more than 1,000 copies on Steam, it will probably sell 10-100 copies on Epic Games Store.” (It’s still >0, and will scale depending on game size, tho.)
Metaverse megafan and VC Matthew Ball wrote a truly gigantic ‘state of video games in 2024’ blog post, full of musings on ‘great year for games in 2023, less so the overall industry health’. Notable on games $ vs. other creative media: “not only has gaming underperformed most sectors, it’s one of few media categories to shrink.”
CES 2024 things: Nvidia’s AI-powered video game NPCs impressed one tech reporter at CES, although others are classifying it as ‘expensive improv’; veteran ex-Microsoft-ie Steven Sinofsky walked 38 miles (!) to give us the definite CES ‘trends’ round-up - almost all tech & not games, but fascinating.
Interesting to see Battle.net moving away from using Argentine pesos for Blizzard (and Activision) games too, in favor of the US dollar - after hyperinflation and ‘lite piracy’ concerns got Steam to do similar for Argentina & Turkey back in November 2023. (It’s just too difficult to keep up on currency parity.)
Esoteric media microlinks: counterfeit board games are becoming a big problem for that industry; the best of 2023 in ‘pop/modern U.S. music’, and the worst, according to Todd In The Shadows, how U.S. comic book stores ended up faring in 2023, business-wise.
Finally, we just love it that somebody got the ‘U.S. National Security Agency bans Furby toys from its offices’ internal documents from 1998/1999. (You may re-remember Furbies from their ‘bad guy’ role in The Mitchells Vs. The Machines.) Anyhow - documents like this on the ‘Fropie’ panic? Pure gold:
[We’re GameDiscoverCo, an agency based around one simple issue: how do players find, buy and enjoy your PC or console game? We run the newsletter you’re reading, and provide consulting services for publishers, funds, and other smart game industry folks.]