After a few incendiary statements from development and community figures poured kerosene on the debates dominating the Helldivers 2 player base after its recent balance patch, Arrowhead CEO and game director Johan Pilestedt stepped in to assure players that such snippy remarks are "not a message that the studio stands behind."
Palworld’s Community Manager says ‘its fine to take breaks’ amid negative player count discourse
17.02.2024 - 00:25 / destructoid.com
After Palworld started sliding down the Steam charts, the usual it’s a dead game or dying chatter spun up, but I’m not inclined to go exclusively off of Steam’s player count to determine a game’s long-term health, and the same appears true for Pocketpair. The studio’s community manager, Bucky, seems to feel the same if their recent Twitter post is anything to go by.
It’s not very often that a game, especially one from a smaller studio, becomes as much of an overnight success as Palworld did. The stories of broken records came thick and fast: millions of players, concurrent player counts, the likes of which are rarely seen, and Pocketpair pumping out the patches to resolve issues as fast as possible.
It’s fair to say that Palworld was a phenomenon, and it still is. At the time of writing, 419,000 people are playing Palworld on PC according to SteamDB, and it’s currently third in the charts, above PUBG and Helldivers 2. Sure, there’s a gulf between 2 million players and 400,000 players, but after a month in and an explosive debut, perhaps it’s nothing of shock.
With Palworld quickly approaching the 1-month mark, it's interesting to look back at my own thoughts for launch.
In May of 2023, I was convinced that Palworld could break the 50,000 player mark. Anything above that seemed unobtainable though, and I certainly never expected it to… pic.twitter.com/1rZaV30QON
Is that really worth all of the bizarre player count discourse? By much of the standard set by other top 10 Steam games, 400,000 is no number of concurrent players to shrug at. Bucky recently took to Twitter to address the framing around Palworld, writing, “This emerging ‘Palworld has lost X% of its player base’ discourse is lazy, but it’s probably also a good time to step in and reassure those of you capable of reading past a headline that it is fine to take breaks from games. You don’t need to feel bad about that.”
It’s a fair point, and it’s one that reflects some of my own past experiences. I know all too well what it’s like to put hours upon hours into a game, only to reach the point of burnout. It’s easy enough to “just log off,” of course, but the fear of missing out, being part of the conversation, etc., sometimes prevents me from stepping away. I’ve been there, and it’s come close to ruining my relationship with some games. The whole sunk-cost fallacy weighs heavily when you’re hundreds of hours into something.
Taking a break from any game isn’t just good; it’s necessary. It’s unhealthy to pour everything you have into a virtual world while forgetting everything else. Palworld isn’t going anywhere; Pocketpair has explicitly said that it’s only 60% complete, with last month’s roadmap acknowledging as much. Besides, as Bucky noted,
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