I have not played Palworld but I love that it has exposed the greed and capitalist rot of the company that makes Pokemon. Seriously, the "old guard" video game giants like GameFreak, Valve, etc. are putting out lazy content and sucking up billions from micro-transactions, lazy retreads, and subscriptions. It's just funny to see capitalists be bad at capitalism.
Isn't the Palword dev an NFT and AI stan that stole most of the models?
You do not have to hand it to them. Picking one souless company over the other just because they're the 'little guy' isn't praxis. It's just marketing.
Anyway, there are better indie monster collectors that deserve more support. Check out Cassette Beasts, Monster Sanctuary and Coromon.
I like parts of this story. I think it's funny and great that this ragtag group of Japanese misfit game dev amateurs stumbled onto a huge hit by cobbling together a bunch of game design ideas from different popular games from the past decade and sprinkling Pokemon on top of them. This hacked together Frankenstein of a meme game has probably outsold FFXVI by now
Apparently the CEO couldn't get hired by big Japanese studios, then found out Steam would let anyone sell games on there
I also like that their character designer is some high school dropout who they found working at a 7/11 near their office
On the other hand, from the CEO's NFT and AI tweets and his own admission that he's more interested in chasing trends than innovative, boundary-pushing game design he kind of seems like an opportunistic rise and grind dipshit
I don't like nintendo, microsoft, sony, etc, and I'm simultaneously also not a fan of shady crypto/nft/ai people
There's no proof of ai generation being used in palworld itself but it is clear that the devs are bazinga brains. I don't think this game is any less a cynical cashgrab than games from the big players in the industry
There's no proof of ai generation being used in palworld itself
Also the timeline for that doesn't line up. AI generated art was absolute dogshit at the point in the dev cycle where it could have been used, and by the time it reached the "maybe make some concept art to be reimagined as a 3d model" level they'd have to have been in the final stretch towards making it playable. Even now, "AI art" for a 3d game is theoretically using it to upscale, clean up, and detail a rough sketch, something that's only been done in proof-of-concept things AFAIK.
They did seemingly just straight up rip pokemon 3d models and then change them up in blender though which is extremely funny and literally stealing directly from Nintendo is laudable in almost any circumstance, but they are probably going to get completely fucked in the courts over it, lmao.
literally stealing directly from Nintendo is laudable in almost any circumstance
funnily enough this particular context feels like the sole exception because it's a bunch of bazinga types using the stolen models to churn out more fucking slop
piracy is cool, fangames/romhacks/etc are based etc, meanwhile this just feels so lame in comparison
Real cool kids are playing Shin Megami Tensei and their monster collecting games. Comon guys, as communists we must all support games about killing god
A Reddit link was detected in your post. Here are links to the same location on Teddit and Libreddit, which are Reddit frontends that protect your privacy.