One thing that strikes me these days is that for every success there’s a whole bunch of people who are going to talk about that success. And you can’t really blame them. But the content of those conversations and comments can and will vary wildly from being accurate to a whole other level entirely.
Take the recently released Star Wars game, Jedi Survivor, currently sitting at 6/10 on Steam and subject to a lot of negative press.
Shortly after that game came out I was at an event and I spoke with one of the team who worked on the game, I asked a very pointed question – since a chunk of that negativity had been directed at the game being a “bad PC port” I was keen to understand if this was accurate.
[In this case a PC port being a product that had to be converted to running on PC]
Well it wasn’t. The game was developed in Unreal Engine, and if you know anything about that you’ll know that it’s a native to PC development engine. There was no requirement to port it to PC.
For the record one of the main reasons for the initial poor performance issues was, and this is really interesting to me as a technical guy, simply due to the fact that the developers were using exceptionally high powered PCs during the development process.
I gave the developers at Antimatter pretty much cutting edge PCs, we overspecced them, more CPU and Memory than was really needed, faster drive tech and the best graphics power we could get for the budgets we had.
In my strategic mind this meant that the PC was not any part of a reason why work output slowed. The more powerful the machine the less time required to render, compile, and do all sorts of work that might mean the operator would have to wait.
But that’s another, unfinished post, today I’m going to talk about a success and I’m also going to slightly critique others talking about that success too.
Palworld.
It sometimes escapes me, as a gamer, that people don’t hear about batshit trends in gaming. Take my lovely wife for example, she literally has zero interest in games, sure she knows that the industry is in a bit of an odd place right now, but she does not do details.
She’s got no idea what Palworld is, or how much of a massive splash it’s made. As for a success, I honestly can’t negatively look at any success because it’s become all too clear just how hard an industry games is just to break in.
I recently spoke to a founder of a company who told me that they had to meet three investors per day, six days a week for several months just to find someone to invest in their studio AND they’re going to have to do that all again at some point as they will need a further investment.
That’s hard. Especially when you just want to make your art.
So back to Palworld and their developer, Pocket Pair.
I hope I’m not doing them a disservice but I didn’t really know the studio before the game, so in this post I’m going to dive in a little.
If you check out their website they describe themselves as “A top indie game company in Japan” I can’t speak for if that was on the site pre-Palworld or not, but either way, right now, you have to agree with them!
The site also says this; “Pocketpair is a small group of creators who love making games.”
Small.
Consider that.
We’re trying to get funded to start a studio to complete the title we have, and we’re looking at 25+ staff, I’d probably not describe that as small. So just how small are these guys?
Founded in 2015, so not a new company by any stretch and based in Tokyo
Prior to this I’d purposely not done a lot of research so I could do it whilst writing. One of the stories I had heard about the development of the game was that to create a hundred Pals the company gave the job to an intern, who sought inspiration from elsewhere.
Right now do we really believe that was true? See my comments on Jedi Survivor above for an inkling into my thoughts on the answer.
Something that jumped right out at me as really interesting initially was a little title by the name of Craftopia, which is a name I vaguely remember. It’s a sandbox multiplayer survival action game that was released in 2020.
If you watch the following video you’ll notice some very significant things.
It looks, sounds and has many of the features of Palworld, it also borrows from other games in the genre.
At this point I really don’t want to get too far into the scuttle of if it’s “ripping off” stuff. I can see nods to several games in that two minutes of footage and, honestly, at this point, is there ever anything original any more?
[Well, check out my post on Cocoon if it’s live yet for at least one response top that!]
BUT you can definitely see the tech and the early development of this title has contributed to Palworld in a major way, and, actually it’s a very clever strategy. Put out a title that is not EA but is a forerunner to something bigger, iron out the bugs and find useful feedback from the community. Look on Steam and you’ll see Craftopia has 16,000ish reviews and Palworld 200,000 plus! I’ve only just realised it’s only £25 too, I got it on Gamepass, but that’s a really decent price too especially as it’s sold 12,000,000 copies on Steam!
I struggled to find accurate data on company size, but found a reference to them hiring “over 40 additional employees” so I’d imagine it’s possibly around 100 staff now?
Also projected costs for the games development put it at $6.7 million which, considering it’s now sold 12 million copies on Steam at £25 you have to think they can probably afford the extra live service costs I’m about to talk about further down there!
The company is now being looked at as a possible acquisition by Microsoft if the rumours are to be believed, having had some skin in the funding and acquisition game in the last year I can’t honestly tell you how I’d feel if I were part of their leadership team. They’ve made a thing, and become possibly way more successful than they could have ever expected to be, so maybe now they might feel more comfortable about just being part of something larger.
Going to be an interesting one to watch.
Anyway, back to my comments earlier on people using success as a base for their own conversations, the trigger for this post (it’s been gestating in my brain for a while now, but that set me off when I should be doing more important work!) was a comment on a social media platform about their server costs.
[Always something to drag it back to boring old IT stuffs huh?!]
Specifically this was a little bit of self-promotion about server hosting. And you know what, in my official position as the worlds worst marketeer (these posts are seen by a handful of people at the very most!) I don’t think it’s entirely fair to blame someone using a situation like this to market their own services, I do get a little bit indifferent when the tagline proclaims they can cut the companies hosting costs in half.
Now experience has shown me that there are some games companies out there that almost certainly do use solutions that are more expensive than they need to be but, on the whole, unless you’re completely clueless in business management and strategy you’re going to be looking at these costs and ways to improve them, right?
Either way, alls fair in business and marketing…..let people hang their services off the back of someone’s success. The bit in question didn’t claim anything outlandish, just made some assumptions about Pocketpairs infrastructure and suggested their service could cheapen it.
I may know a thing or two about online server hosting and, who knows, in the future that might become a whole lot more of a known subject, time will tell.
But I do know about scalable systems and I also know how it is eminently possible to put something in place that does not offer the sort of crazy scalability several million users may require. There’s only so far you can cut your cloth in these situations.
I’ve seem some wonderful solutions that are simply far too cost-prohibitive initially for a “small” solution, and that was enough to scare me off, so I couldn’t honestly speak to if these solutions become cheaper once you scale, but I was looking at much smaller capacities and therefore much lower upfronts.
And to be fair I’m absolutely NOT criticising anyone here, as I said, alls fair. However follow ups start to get a little picky. In this instance every stayed civil, honestly that’s good to see. But as with Jedi, these conversations almost certainly added to the bad press and I wonder if they affected sales in any way.
Palworld was an explosion in every sense of the word, and you know what, for a studio that’s been around for ten years I think they do deserve the success, even if it does feel like it’s got similarities to other, more established, games.
For what it’s worth I think there’s enough in the gameplay loop to set it aside from the obvious competition, it’s a well-made title, does not make my PC run like a jumbo jet like other games I could point to do [even games that have had years of development yet still seem to lack that optimisation] so here’s hoping the future is bright for these guys, I think we should all agree they deserve it.