PC Gaming

Because it shows many people are playing it. That in itself may be of interest to people who are considering purchasing the game. Also it let's the devs know there is a market potentially interested in DLC or sequels. If the news was that player counts dropped to a very small number, neither of those things are likely to happen

I mean, I started playing once I heard how popular it was.

Pokémon with guns didn’t really interest me as a description but it turns out it’s fun when you try it.

If so many people hadn’t been recommending it. I would’ve never known.

At some point when something gets so popular, you try it just to see what you’re missing out on even if you don’t think it’s gonna be your cup of tea.

And it’s really more like Pokémon mixed with ARK

Even if it's not an MMO, player count can be a very strong indicator of enjoyment/income at a given time. Even if it's a single player game, player count can show how popular a game is on whole. If a 5yo game still has engagement numbers above newly released games, it's strongly correlated with studio income/gamer trends.

They can base future decisions on what they did correctly/incorrectly, and develop their next game/dlc/etc with those lessons learned.

Release a game that has nobody playing after a month? Crapbasket. Release a game that has well into a million players despite the age? Fucking masterpiece.

Currently in the industry there are two ways to get the "big money" without resort on MTX and GaaS.

1. "big day one selling carnival". With few exception with titles such as Skyrim and GTAV (which have multiple "day one" or duble-dip), this is how the AAA industry makes the big money: the very first days is where the publisher try to recover+earn money as whole. Later copies sold are mostly for bundles or special offer.

2. Early Access program. That's where Palworld fall into. With few exceptions, this is the primary tool for indie developer that can't invest money in marketing "big day one carnival". It's safer because route because they don't to compete with the "day one carnival" from other AAA publisher. And can know straight away how much money they need to scale up (or down) their vision for the project (something WB couldn't have when they went the suicide squad route)

Basically, for Palworld have success (or not) alter how the product scale the game itself will be.

It works like free marketing for a successful title

As far as marketing... It is binign

I don't see why not. You can obtain every resource yourself it just takes way longer. And if you play loose with the rules of the challenge, you can capture humans and use them instead of the Pals.

Theoretically, yes. But it's way more time consuming to be worth it. You can watch a couple videos on YouTube with "No Pal Runs"

I tend to use less powerful bows or weaker pals to weaken, call back your pal when most work has been done and use better balls for stronger pals.

Yep. Theres a bunch of new bros including a tiny armadillo and I love it so much. Also huge qol changes and items and moves and levels and gear and.... It's a lot.

I play it on my steam deck, runs just fine. Some of the text is just very very small and therefore hard to read.

Mine gets hooot