Yeah, you’re prone to having one of the biggest drops when you’ve got one of the biggest peaks. What a garbage article.
Palworld’s next update and early access roadmap are already on the cards, so it’s now up to Pocketpair to keep supporting the game and listening to players to keep them hooked.
NO IT’S NOT. The only thing it’s on them to do is to finish it. They sell the game for $30, and this is not a live service game. They don’t need to keep anyone hooked.
not to speak for anyone what they ment but I took hooked the saw way I see satisfactory. keeping engment high by taking in feedback to make a really good end product. not use exploitive tricks to get people addicted to something that is not fun.
It’s hard for me to take it that way when the author is citing player count numbers in the headline as though that matters at all in a game with finite content and a low cost of entry. Even you using the word “engagement” in what’s meant to be an innocent way just has me thinking about how live service games have poisoned the way people speak and think about video games.
I mean, as it stands now, there’s no gameplay other than “build up base”, “collect all monsters” and “level up”. End game is non-existent. It needs something more or it absolutely will die. There’s been a million open world survival games that have come and gone for the same reason. This very well could just be a flash in the pan, largely held up by hype more than anything.
I can’t think of a game that I’ve played and enjoyed that had an “end game” except rolling credits, and that’s totally fine. Flashes in the pan are totally fine. The game can’t “die” as long as a single person wants to play it, because it’s playable regardless of the presence of the company’s servers.
I can definitely think of quite a few non-live-service games with an “end game” that I’ve enjoyed:
- (Older) Pokémon games with their battle towers, where putting together a flexible team with as few weaknesses as possible is the aim.
- Loot games like Borderlands, Grim Dawn and Last Epoch where I want to make new builds and test their limits against harder and harder challenges.
- Factorio, where I want to optimise my factory. Although there’s absolutely an argument to be made that that is the game, but I think it becomes more about player-set goals once you’ve launched the rocket.
All of them are either offline or have offline modes available. All of them have potentially infinite “content” if you’re the sort of person who like optimising, or just being able to set yourself new targets. They’re all enjoyable to play for their “campaigns” alone, but they also have very strong sandboxes that players can continue to engage with even after the game stops giving them objectives.
I don’t necessarily disagree with your overall sentiment, though. I think MMO-style “end games” where you login for your daily, time-gated quests and do the same thing you always do with no variation or sense of progression (be it narrative, emotional, build-related or some other kind of progression) isn’t necessarily healthy. And I dislike the way “end games” have tended to move away from being optional post-game content for people who aren’t ready to finish playing yet and instead are often viewed as the main game that you have to get through the sorry excuse for a campaign/story to access.
OMG, stfu. No one is talking about “you’re still alive as long as someone remembers your name” type bullshit. We mean an active and engaged player base. That’s what a games “death” refers to. You are being incredibly obtuse.
You are right, but is it any different for games like Ark, Conan, VRising, Rust or any other sandbox builder focused on multiplayer? It’s always just a farm-build-collect-repeat cycle. It’s why I get bored of them easily at least, the only games in that genre that can usually keep my attention are Factorio and Valheim.