Palworld dev says talk of player dropoff is 'lazy' and 'it is fine to take breaks from games'

pcgamer.com:

Palworld is 2024's first surprise hit, combining all the familiar elements of the popular survival genre with an irresistible layer of Pokémon-inspired Pals to do your bidding. It's a game with no firm endpoint but a finite amount of stuff to do, and so unsurprisingly plenty of players picked it up, played it, and moved onto other things. 

Players and developers now have access to a wealth of statistics about games, and a particular bone of contention for many is how numbers like concurrent players can be used as a bit of a cudgel, and sometimes in an inaccurate manner. Concurrents can be a useful guide to how certain multiplayer-focused games are doing (and Palworld does have a large co-op element) but have little value for singleplayer games other than confirming that, yes, a lot of folk bought Starfield and played it on launch day. And Palworld's successful and almost viral launch period saw millions playing the game before, almost a month later, a lot of them have moved onto the next thing. 

The game has been dinged for its player numbers going down when, really, anyone could've seen this was inevitable. Palworld's not an MMO, it's not a live service game, and it's not something like Counter-Strike 2. The criticism seems to have stung one Pocketpair dev, anyway, who has doubtless just enjoyed the busiest month of their entire life.

Bucky is Pocketpair's community manager, but is also credited on Palworld as a designer and for the localisation. They chose the approaching one-month mark to look back on the game's success, recalling that back in May 2023 (by which time the game had already attracted much attention thanks to the «Pokémon with guns» elevator pitch) «I was convinced that Palworld could break the 50,000 player mark.» But that was an aspirational figure, «and I certainly never expected it to reach into the millions.»

Pocketpair is working away on any remaining issues as it begins preparing new content and Pals for the game. «Some of you may have had