You're acting like 337k concurrent isn't still amazing. Its still the 5th highest concurrent on all of steam at this very moment. Games launch with high concurrent and its only natural for it to decline after a month. Especially when it's a game with a finite amount of content. This is a game where you play it, beat it, and then it's done until there's an update with more content. It's not a live service game where they are trying to get you to continuously play. I got over 100 hours in this game before beating all current content after 2 weeks. I'm more than satisfied with the $28 I paid for it. And ill play it again when it gets new content. If you like the survival genre and or pokemon, this game is worth a shot. It's one of the funnest games I've played in a while. The sense of progression is great. But this game won't be for everyone as we all have our preferences.
It's almost like a few other games that are hugely popular got released and initial launch numbers never stay that high regardless as the novelty wears off and only the really committed players come back regularly.
A few dozen hours of content over the course of a month; I don't think it's strange that the player count dropped substantially. Live service games just broke how people think about video games, and this isn't a live service.
Not surprising after the initial hype wears off. It's not like this is a game that has a ton of long-term things to do. And it's still very buggy. I imagine a lot of people will sit it out until there's some sort of major content update.
Yeah, the game's popularity comes directly from it's gimmicky nature and not from any actual good gameplay loop. Not a single idea, mechanic, or even item is original.
I played for two days with friends and got over it. And I imagine for many, once the appeal of the gimmick wears thin, it's all and over with
There's such a vanishingly small amount of things that are truly "new" in the 21st century. I'd say just about everything ever made in the last few hundred years hardly counts as "new" - it's just synthesis of things that came before, probably from nature if you go back far enough.
Novelty truly comes from combining existing things in ways that haven't been done before. In this regard, palworld has done BRILLIANTLY, taking the best parts of some other games, putting them together far better than those other games, and getting something that's way more than the sum of parts.
Palworlds real failing at the moment is simply that it's early access. The game is fantastic until you hit a middle point where content just falls flat. But, again, it's early access. If there's ever a thing to be written off during early access, it's not all the content being done.
Its a fun and engaging game that im sure will have more fleshed out as development continues. I wouldn’t call it gimmicky at all. Some people play for a bit then stop either waiting for updates, to play another game (lots of good games came out around its release) or for literally any other reason in my case i broke my hand.