https://twitter.com/Palworld_EN/status/1834947171944485224
We are not changing our game's business model, it will remain buy-to-play and not f2p or GaaS.
this post was submitted on 14 Sep 2024
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Kinda brutal the journalist didn’t mention that the quote they were taking was from an interview from several months ago.
“Journalist”
Up you go, needs more visibility
Beep beep coming though!
How about finishing the damn thing and than,
Idk, making something new perhaps, dare I say, even original?
Yeah but why would you want to finish a game as a dev nowadays? You get paid for your early beta releases (= "early access"), not for finishing it from there.
Basically, an unfinished game has infinite possibilities.
Is ~20k and dropping daily players enough to warrant a live service model? 🤔
Didn't they make 10-100s millions of dollars on this? Pays a lot of salaries while you make new paid content.
EDIT : They made at least 12 million sales on steam, and had 7 million players on Xbox, which may be Gamepass, but still makes them money.
So at $30, that's 66million from steam minus 30% for steams cut, so they banked 44 million at least.
They can pay 440 devs 100k for at least a year. I assume their team is a bit smaller than that, so they likely have years of runway. Linkedin lists size as between 50-200 in japan, so that likely means they are making $50-70k, and there are likely more than 100 devs. I would guess they have a 4 year runway from Steam sales, and maybe 1-2 year from Gamepass.
They got some time to think.
According to their careers page, they have about 60 employees. And, knowing japanese game dev salaries, a lot of those devs (excluding senior devs) probably make around 30-50k a year depending on seniority unless it's a unicorn company.
Yeah...that changes the numbers. More like 10-20 years to do just about anything.
Somehow the urgency just drains right out of this for me.
Iirc they started paying their devs waaaay more after the game sold a ton.
no line must go up, only up, up now and up tomorrow and the days after too. fire all the devs too, paying them makes line go down.
Anyone know if The Finals counts as a "live service" game? It's free to play and I think it's fantastic - both the game and the fact it's free.
I just don't play games enough to justify the huge asking prices anymore. The last games I paid for were COD MW2 and Cyberpunk and I doubt I'll ever drop $70+ for a game again, especially when there's games like splitgate and whatnot that are free (not that I ever tried the new one. lol)
I would definitely classify The Finals as a live service. The way I see it, any game that is designed to be "never-ending", and have a constant stream of new content (free or paid) would fall under this category of game.
I wouldn't say it's a requirement for all live service games, but I'd also say that anything that uses "seasonal" content models would also be considered a live service.
Yes, it's a live service game. Most major free to play games are. Instead of selling you the game or selling adspace to advertisers, they sell you bits and pieces of the game like skins and such.
Meanwhile I avoided playing because I wanted to wait until it was out of early access and had its full release... Seems like I'll either never get that, or by the time I do, the game will already be dead
If it's dead by then, it wouldn't have been a good investment. I'd rather not waste time in a game that won't live past the hype.
I feel like I already got way more than my money's worth out of the game, and I'm happy to have moved on to other games. Not every game has to last forever.
Any game that doesn't last forever was robbed of doing so arbitrarily. If they never updated Palworld again, in its current form, it will last forever.
That's not really true... No closed source software that isn't actively developed should be expected to last forever. Eventually the binaries will get to the point where nothing will run them.
You also can't emulate Windows. Maybe you could virtualize Linux and use wine, but even that is a tall order for "forever".
You can emulate machines that can run Windows, and that's very effective at preservation. Wine is already better than modern Windows at running software that relies on deprecated dependencies. But live service is just purposely killing games that didn't need to die.
You can emulate machines that can run Windows, and that's very effective at preservation.
Hmm... I'm unaware of this, but I guess it's theoretically possible. Still it's a lot harder to emulate x86 + some graphics hardware than it is to emulate a Gameboy.
Wine is already better than modern Windows at running software that relies on deprecated dependencies.
Agreed, but it's not a silver bullet and A LOT of stuff is going to be shaken up now that x86 is starting to be challenged. For a long time PCs have been entirely operating on x86 (which is arguably part of why Java died ... the abstraction just wasn't necessary). That x86 dominance I think may have given a false sense of security for software longevity.
It's not even that it's hard to port the games, but without the source code, it's just not going to happen.
I kind of wish there were laws where source code had to be released after X years of inactivity, especially for games for the cultural preservation aspect. Like if you have abandoned a game and not released any new content (especially if you haven't released even any bug fixes/have totally abandoned the game), after 10 years the game code must be released.
I don't necessarily think it needs to be a release of rights, assets, or anything like that ... but being unable to operate a game you've bought just because it was built for an older piece of hardware is 👎.
But live service is just purposely killing games that didn't need to die.
Bad live services are killing (in many cases bad) games that didn't need to die (and might have been better if less time was spent trying to force something to be a live service that didn't need to be one).
There's a big difference between Suicide Squad Kill The Justice League and say... PUBG, Fortnite, Hunt Showdown, WOW, RuneScape, etc
The inevitable outcome for every live service game is that it becomes inoperable and unplayable, even the good ones. It doesn't matter if it's Suicide Squad or Fortnite. They all should still be preserved. Open source is appreciated but not necessary.
I don't think Fortnite can be meaningfully preserved anymore than say, Cedar Point can personally.
Live services can also certainly transition out of a live service state; or if the source code is disclosed (per my previous statement) they can be transitioned by the community after they seize operation. Building a game like Fortnite or RuneScape just doesn't work without it being a centralized "destination." The experience is about the large number of players as much as it's about the game play.
Live services are more of a destination than a product ... and for match made competitive shooters and things of that ilk ... I think that's fine.
If someone 50 years from now wants to see what this game Fortnite was all about, they should be able to get a reasonable approximation of it by booting it up and playing with 100 other people. That's what it means to preserve it. We've had and will continue to have competitive games that are not live service.
We've had and will continue to have competitive games that are not live service.
Interesting question... What competitive games from the last 10 years would you consider to be not live service games?
I'm way into fighting games. Even the ones with a battle pass and such can still be played offline (except maybe for 2XKO and Brawlhalla) and quite frankly can't match the content churn that other genres do in the live service space.
I've never really been into fighting games; I did some Smash Brothers when I was younger but that's about it. I think fighting games are a fairly different beast entirely; they're a far more "couch friendly" genre.
They also don't tend to have the absolutely massive operating costs where "it costs literally hundreds of thousands of dollars to make this map" and server costs of "it cost hundreds per month to run just a few servers (because of the complexity of processing all of the elements of an individual match" that Fortnite, PUBG, and Hunt Showdown have to deal with.
Live Service:
- https://steamcharts.com/app/578080
- https://steamcharts.com/app/1172470
- https://steamcharts.com/app/359550
- https://steamcharts.com/app/440
- https://steamcharts.com/app/230410
- https://steamcharts.com/app/2357570
- https://steamcharts.com/app/594650
Never adopted a live service (but a big name):
- https://steamcharts.com/app/1517290
- https://steamcharts.com/app/1238810
- https://steamcharts.com/app/1238840
- https://steamcharts.com/app/1238860
Live service is worse for the shooter genre on "eventual death" ... but so far none of the popular live service shooter games have really died. Meanwhile games that haven't and are still trying to compete with the "buy the new game for a premium price tag" (like Battlefield) are hurting. Calling of Duty is another big name that almost certainly is suffering from this problem but it can't be charted because they reorganized their game as "everything is under 'Call of Duty'".
The fighting games on steam don't even come close to any of the shooter numbers.
Other big genres like strategy do fine with the big release (in no small part because a big part of their game play is single player or "play with a well known group of friends"), e.g., https://steamcharts.com/app/289070 and https://steamcharts.com/app/413150 (both of those games also have seen almost "live service-like" levels of service via additional content throughout their lifespan).
Live services get a lot of hate on Lemmy ... but there genuinely is something to them when they're done well. They're often better for shooters because the incremental changes allow developers to back off and fix things without totally fragmenting their community.
Battlefield 2042 and Hunt Showdown: 1896 are great examples of this ... They both had rocky launches. Battlefield is a bigger franchise but because they made "extreme changes" vs incremental changes Battlefield 2042 is in much worse shape than Hunt Showdown: 1896 is and Crytek will in all likelihood be able to fix the things that people are upset about and get their numbers higher than they were. Dice/EA's best chance is "try again next year" at this point with their model (which will almost certainly cost players another $70 minimum to get into). Even then the game will remain fragmented with all the different Battlefield games out there and the expense of getting a new one.
If you're frugal you could've played Hunt Showdown from 2018-present for its original price of $29 for the battlefield community for the same time frame to play on release you would've needed to spent $180 minimum.
I don't think it's a good argument to say that it's okay for a game to inevitably die because they're doing better right now. Brink, Overwatch 1, and HyperScape are fully dead, btw. I'd rather be able to pay $60 and have a game I can play forever than save money on a game that's designed to self destruct.
Doesn't matter if it's "dead" or not, it's not really meant to be a massively multiplayer game.
same
Same boat, waiting for 1.0, now worried I'll miss the boat entirely, but I'm not going to buy their early access for that fear mongering. They made millions, they can ensure their game lives on one way or another.
Wow, this shouldn't be a hard choice. Keeping the current model of buy to play would be best, I wouldn't think that Palworld would even benefit from a live-service model, given those games seem to die a lot faster than the standard buy and play.
Typically live service games last a lot longer in terms of new content and updates. There are a lot of recent complete failures of live services though that didn't make it more than a couple of months ... they're just bad games.
If a CEO of a company don't even know what to do you know the product is doomed to fail. They should've had this kind of stuff figured out way at early access launch, or even before that already.
They have already been charging people for the game so if they become a free to play live service it feels like a bait and switch.
Its honestly such a dead game at the moment, as in the world feels super empty and uninteresting. The pathing for the Pals is really bad too - trying to build a multistorey building is basically a nonstarter as they can't really navigate up stairs.
Based on that you can get costumes/skins for your Pals, I'm pretty sure they'll go live service with those as micro transactions.
It was a fun game for a few hours, but my god it was so fucking overrated. They had a lucky shot hitting the timing on the early access since Pokemon was just another terrible lazy cashgrab job, so practically anything that did even remotely better would get praised into oblivion.
And like 4 months later only 1% of the amount of peak players still remains. I don't think they'll ever get close to that peak again.
Considering the type of game it is, they should go buy to play and then release expansions later on instead.
They should have added a battle tower, that'd add a lot more replay value and keep people coming back years later.
Source: Pokemon games like the DS generation of Pokemon games.
Heck live service.
I haven't bought Palworld yet. What is the current state of the game?
I didn't want to buy it because I saw some friends playing it many months ago when it released and it look janky as fuck. Buggy AI pathfinding, janky enemy AI, NPCs getting stuck on terrain objects or player objects, physics bugs.
Have these things been fixed/improved since launch?