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Nintenwon’t Sue
The meteoric rise of Palworld is a song for the ages. Two weeks ago, it was sitting in 5th place for all-time concurrent Steam numbers. Today, the throne is forever etched with it sitting at #2. Or #1 if you add the 3 million concurrent Xbox/Game Pass players to the Steam total. Overall, there have been 19 million players shooting adorable animals in the face and/or enslaving them in little balls.
Unfortunately, Palworld may have finally gotten to close to the sun. Or has it?
It always seemed a question of “when” rather than “if” Nintendo would sue Palworld over copyright infringement for what the media (and everyone) describes as “Pokemon with Guns.” In the latest Nintendo investor call, someone brought up Palworld and this is what the Nintendo president, Shuntaro Furukawa, said:
We will take appropriate action against those that infringe on our intellectual property rights.
Let’s just take a moment and appreciate the craftmanship of that sentence. It says so much without saying anything at all, which in turn says so much.
Nintendo has never been shy about suing anyone and anything into oblivion for copyright infringement, so the fact that Palworld made it into Early Access at all is indicative that any hypothetical lawsuit was risky. That it continued to make headlines and break records unimpeded further indicates hesitation. And this legalese statement essentially confirms that if Nintendo ever does get around to business, the lawsuit will be from an oblique angle, at best.
The Palworld devs aren’t worried. As they noted back in January:
Pocketpair isn’t concerned with the similarities, though. Speaking to Japanese gaming news outlet Automation, company CEO and lead developer Takuro Mizobe said that Palworld has passed all the necessary legal hurdles to clear it of copyright infringement. He also noted that there haven’t been any legal actions taken against Pocketpair for its overt comparisons to Pokémon—at least not yet, anyway.
“We make our games very seriously,” Mizobe said. “And we have absolutely no intention of infringing upon the intellectual property of other companies.”
Is it hubris? Actually, probably not.
We can say “Palworld is a rip-off of Pokemon,” but that is A) not all that accurate, and B) at best a moral statement. Game mechanics cannot be copyrighted. Attacking cute animals in tall grass and then capturing them with spheres is not protected expression. And three cheers for that! Can you imagine if Hit Points, Experience Points, talents, aiming down sights, side-scrolling, or any of the myriad of common mechanics were the exclusive domain of whomever first came up with them?
What about patents though? You may have heard about how Richard Garfield and Wizards of the Coast patented the “tapping” mechanic in Magic: the Gathering back in 1995, e.g. turning a card sideways to indicate its use. And over the intervening years, WotC has successfully sued at least two companies – ironically the Pokemon Company, but also the makers of Hex – into at least settling out of court. When it came to Hex though, they deserved it.
However, there is every indication that WotC’s gambit would not be successful anymore. This article touches on it, but basically a Supreme Court ruling in 2014 (Alice v CLS Bank) and subsequent 2018 Federal Court ruling all but closed the door on abstract game rules being patentable. Nevermind that the patent expired years ago anyway. Tap to your heart’s content! (This is not legal advice)
So, yeah. The Palworld mod that literally put Pokemon into the game? DMCA’d. Regular ole’ Palworld? Completely fine. And, honestly, kind of a perfect example of why none of this sort of thing should be locked down as the exclusive right of one corporation. Are the individual mechanics completely unique? Nope. But rather than the copy & paste shovelware you see in app stores, Pocket Pair is at least trying to take all the fun stuff from the games they like and mash it together and see if the result is just as fun. As armchair devs, we all like to say “I wish I could play X with the mechanic from Y.” Well, here is someone doing exactly that and it’s working. I saw that energy in Craftopia and I see that here in Palworld. We could do with more of that, not less, IMO.
#JustPalworldThings
Courtesy of our friend Bhagpuss:
My hope was that I’d be able to get Pal fluid more peaceably, perhaps by extracting it painlessly from one of the creatures in my care, although now I say it out loud, I’m not sure that sounds any less disturbing. Sadly, it appears you can’t milk Pengullets or Teafants for their juices, so I had to jog down the path and club one to death for the final fluid I needed.
It’s not Rimworld, but it feels in the same galaxy.
P.S. Some interesting unlocks coming on my next level-up:
P.P.S. Did I mention Pal Spheres work on human opponents too?
P.P.P.S. Yes. The answer is yes.
Impressions: Palworld
In case you haven’t heard the news, Palworld is doing gangbusters: 2 million copies sold in the first 24 hours. And now 4 million within three days. It even hit a peak concurrent player rate of 1.2 million players on Steam, which leapfrogged it past Cyberpunk 2077 and into the top 5 of all time.
That is insanely impressive considering it’s also on Game Pass and Epic Game Store, so that’s just a fraction of its total reach.
Palworld’s tagline is “Pokemon with guns,” which is basically just S-Tier marketing and nothing else. The reality is that it’s “ARK with Pokemon”… like completely. Each time you level up, you get Engram Technology points which you spend to unlock specific recipes on specific tiers. You also get Attribute points to level up one of your base stats like carry weight, attack damage, Stamina, etc. Even the building mechanism via the menu wheel feels identical. Which isn’t to say it’s all bad, just that “Pokemon with guns” is exploiting an information gap in the promotional materials that becomes apparent right away in the gameplay.
Having said that, Palworld does indeed make some good innovations in the general ARK formula. The biggest thing you notice right away is that Pals can be set to work in your camp. The work that Pals can complete differs based on their type – Lamballs hang around Ranches to self-groom their wool, Cattivas will work in your Quarries – but most of them can do basic stuff like wandering around and moving supplies to chests. The fact that they do anything at all beyond staying stock-still waiting for an mistaken Follow-All whistle makes Pals miles better than the dinosaurs of ARK.
Unfortunately, I cannot comment much further impression-wise because Palworld started to crash to desktop in 5-minute increments for me. Some Early Access releases are basically soft-launches of fully playable games (Against the Storm, etc), but Palworld is very Early Access in… let’s say, the more traditional sense. It’s been a while since I played something that lacked the ability to Exit the game. Like, you literally have to Alt-F4 to turn the game off.
…unless you are playing the Steam (or non-Game Pass) version. There has already been a patch v0.1.2 release to address various bugs, including some that cause crashes and also a bug that causes ambient sounds to not play. Which is a big deal, as the silence when running around is a bit conspicuous. Also, Steam players get an Exit button on the menu. For the Game Pass plebs like myself, such a patch has to go through Microsoft’s certification process, and who knows when that will go live. For how much Microsoft pays to have Day 1 releases on Game Pass, it’s a pretty big limiting factor for these Early Access titles.
Honestly, it almost makes me want to just buy the game on Steam. Almost.
As it stands, I’m pretty conflicted about playing Palworld further at the moment. The crashes to desktop notwithstanding, there are other elements to the game that are very early Early Access. Your base can be raided by AI, for example, but the two times I got the notification, the enemies spawned down a hill and never moved even when I started attacking them. One of the v0.1.2 patch notes mentions how the arrows recipe went from 1:1 to 3:1, which is significant reduction in terms of resources you have to grind – I have not yet found a Pal that cuts trees, so I’m still manually doing that. While the EA dilemma is something you always have to consider, it’s been a while since I had to weigh it against really basic functionality like this.
Of course, the fact that the scales had to come out at all is indicative that Palworld is on to something. Is it ground-breaking innovation? Nope. I described it as “ARK with Pokemon” before and it still really feels that way. But ARK peaked at less than 250k concurrent players on Steam, ever. Sometimes the derivatives end up being better than the original. Or maybe devs should be selling their games for $30.
Asset Flip
One of the games I was looking forward to during the previous Steam sale was one called Grand Emprise: Time Travel Survival. The trailer was amazing, the premise novel, the gameplay was survival-crafting, it had it all! So, imagine my dismay when I read this review:
You can read the full review yourself, but the gist is that the one-person “dev” downloaded a bunch of Unreal marketplace assets and just dumped them as-is into his game. These environmental assets have demo areas already built, along with tools to customize that area or create new ones, but apparently the dev just used the demo areas. Other reviews point out that the dev has a very cynical marketing mindset wherein he publishes a lot of similar asset flips in Steam trying to determine how to generate traffic (and revenue) using as little effort as possible.
This is further supported by the fact that “Karagon (Survival Robot Riding FPS)” – yes, that’s the actual name – was another indie title this dev released three months ago. I had been looking forward to Karagon too, as a sort of ARK substitute to hold me over until the remaster/sequel got released. The reviews further reinforce the notion that the dev swoops in, dumps a game with recycled assets, and swoops away with whatever cash wasn’t refunded.
The concern about asset flips is not limited to this one specific dude, of course. In my last post, I was talking about Craftopia and all the cool things (and a lot of jank) going on there. What I had not realized was that the devs of Craftopia are the same ones as the upcoming Palworld. If you haven’t seen the amazing trailer for Palworld, take a quick peek now, because it’s worth it. Big publishers can have multiple teams working on different products, but something tells me that that isn’t exactly the case here. In PocketPair’s defense, Palworld is slated for an Early Access release January 2024 and Craftopia has a roadmap that ends in September of this year.
In PocketPair’s non-defense though, their latest trailer showed this area for a split-second:
Is it exact? No. I suppose there are only so many different ways you can construct a stone bridge. And, you know, if you need to put out a trailer for an alpha game to generate buzz, you may as well use whatever you have laying around in any case. That said, the shenanigans with Grand Emprise have made me a bit sensitive to this situation. Was Craftopia’s “Seamless Update” really intended to enhance the game? Or did they want to beta-test their Palworld alpha?
There is potentially a conversation to be had as to whether asset flips are bad at all. Things like microtransactions and DLC put the monetary side of the industry front and center, but it is easy to forget that these things that bring us joy are a product being sold. Therefore it is a bit presumptuous of me to characterize someone as being lazy and cynical when that can technically describe all capitalistic aspects of product development. I’d very much prefer devs to have a passion for the game they are making, but as long as it’s fun, who cares? There are apparently many people who played Grand Emprise and had fun with it.
…yeah, no, can’t do it.
I try to have at least one paragraph where I take the opposite side of the argument just to see if there is something I’m missing, but I don’t think so in this case. Asset flips are shitty and it’s especially frustrating to be a fan of the survival genre when it’s apparently ground zero for this chicanery. We are indeed deep in this bizarro world in which even “completed” games feel like abandonware, but Grand Emprise is a whole other level of nihilism.
I suppose we as gamers are not “owed” the same level of passion as ConcernedApe (Stardew Valley) or the people behind Terraria, but it’s still just sad. We become invested in these gaming experiences in a way that we don’t for other products. So, to me, exploiting that investment oftentimes diminishes my very capacity to be invested in things in the future. That is… just restating the definition of being jaded, but the actual diminishment feels much more personal somehow.
Oh well. Caveat emptor and all that.
In An Age 
Reinvestment
Mar 1
Posted by Azuriel
Palworld, as we’ve established, is having a moment. A sensation, if you will. The latest figures is it selling 25 million copies across Steam and Xbox in a single month. It also breached the 2.1 million concurrent players milestone on Steam, which puts it at #2 of all time, above even Counter-Strike. Palworld has not sustained that concurrency, but it’s nevertheless in exclusive company.
That’s not really what I wanted to talk about today though.
I want to talk about the Japanese blog post by the Palworld game director that was released three days before the official launch. It details the 5+ miracles that he credits with even being able to get Palworld released at all. For example, the gunplay was all designed by a 20-year old convenience store clerk they found on Twitter, who created 3D renders of weapon reload animations in his free time. There are other bits of interesting serendipity, so let Google auto-translate for you and take the ride.
One element that struck me in particular though: funding.
So that was Miracle #5, in that they basically built Palworld without setting a budget at all. It’s actually a bit more interesting than even that, because they didn’t originally want to spend a lot of time making the game at all. But, due to the positive feedback from the initial trailers, they decided to go for broke.
What really gets me though is this last part:
In case you were unaware, before Palworld this company released Craftopia. Which is also still in Early Access. The game isn’t bad, actually, and shows a lot of promise under the jank. Or showed. Because although it is clear that Craftopia’s measured success bankrolled Palworld, it’s not so clear whether any of those millions of Palworld dollars will make their way back back to Craftopia. And that’s just sad.
I get it – this is how most things work pretty much everywhere, especially in the game industry. Release game, collect revenue, use money to continue employing people to create new game, repeat. Indeed, if a particular release falls flat on its face, not only is that series’ future imperiled, sometimes the company itself is at risk. But in this case, the original game (Craftopia) isn’t even done yet. The creators of ARK infamously released a DLC to their Early Access game, but it was arguably necessary because they were running out of cash ($40 million lawsuit settlement will do that to you). I get no sense that Pocket Pair were in similar straits. Rather, it was likely a cold calculation that the Craftopia well was drying up and it was time to move on to other milkshakes, to mix metaphors.
Obviously, the move worked out for Pocket Pair. And, yeah, for millions of players too. I am happy for these devs’ success, as their willingness to try random shit and just go for it is (hopefully) an inspiration to other studios. I just hope some of that Palworld money comes back to Craftopia in a meaningful way, and not just a “we’ll keep these five original dudes employed in a broom closet” way. They don’t have to and economically it would probably be a mistake. But I think they owe it to themselves.
And that’s because without Craftopia there literally wouldn’t be a Palworld. Not just in the funding aspect either. Craftopia actually has capture spheres, riding creatures, and even the ability to capture human NPCs. This is a “Yo dawg, I put Early Access in your Early Access” situation – Palworld is probably 25% of what Craftopia already delivered years ago. Is it the best 25%? Well, it’s hard to argue against a literal pile of
free speechcash.I suppose we’ll have to see how Pocket Pair proceeds. There is technically still a roadmap for Craftopia (circa December 2023) and there have been a few bug patches released since then. I seriously doubt that any amount of reinvestment will have Craftopia achieve a comparable level of success as Palworld – clearly even AAA games have been blown aside – but I do hope that they at least replenish the coffers and allow Craftopia to reach release with the vision and funds it originally earned.
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Tags: Bait & Switch, Craftopia, Early Access, Investment, Palworld, Pocket Pair