With the recent runaway success of Palworld, there is a lot of discussion about how the game managed this. The clear answer is that it is piggybacking off of Pokémon.
This is not to say Palworld is not a good game. In fact, Palworld plays great, but that’s not the main reason it has been so successful.
There are plenty of good and event great games out there and they don’t see the numbers that Palworld has. So what’s the secret sauce? In short, Palworld is capitalizing on Pokémon’s decades long massive cultural mindshare.
People are openly calling Palworld “Pokémon with guns” and that’s an accurate summary in many ways. However, it’s very obvious that without relying on Pokémon’s setup in terms of characterization and base creature functionality, that no-one would have really noticed the game.
We know this because before Niantic made Pokémon GO, they made the genuinely excellent Ingress. That too was a good game and one that used augmented reality and realworld geographical positioning to reach a decent level of success.
However, once that setup was partnered with Pokémon for Pokémon GO we saw a similar runaway success that Ingress had never previously achieved on its own.
The fact that Nintendo are clearly squaring up for a fight is also indicative of the fact that Palworld didn’t just get to where it has on just its own merits.
This is not to take away from what Pocket Pair has accomplished, but the reaction we are seeing to Palworld has far more to do with the global cultural phenomenon that is Pokémon, rather than the quality of the game itself.
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