Palworld is dead to me when I have completly interest and/or my friend group doesn’t want to play
Is Ars Technica a dead publication asked the developer.
Good news: Pocketpair knows and they are now in the licensing phase of the lifecycle
It was a flash-in-the-pan meme game. Of course it’s “dead” in the popularity contest. Only the handful of actual dedicated fans still play it. The majority has moved on to the next meme fad craze/current popular title.
I think it has real staying power, if they can make the rest of the game as content rich as the first dozen or so hours. It’s only a flash in the pan because there’s not more fuel. As is the case for a lot of early access.
It seems to be a recurring problem with most, if not all, these survival crafting games. Which I find unfortunate, because the genre is fertile ground for actual new ideas and perfect for expansion.
The reason they all fail is because of lack of content for end game BUT they fail in that way because they refuse to learn from the titans. Why do you think minecraft and terraria have had such a long healthy life. It’s cause they have a robust modding community. They need to make the game around making it easy to mod for regular people. Look at minecraft skins, they’re easy to make and sites have easy tools to help make em so everyone dips their toes into it and creates unique custom content to add to the minecraft skin library.
People are calling it a dead game because it was a flavor of the month random meme game that happened to get wildly popular and was then left in the toy trunk after its novelty wore off.
When people are calling it ‘dead game’, they do not mean it in the older sense of either a server reliant multiplayer game that has no more players, or that its so old and buggy or incompatible with modern hardware and is not being developed any more, such that the game is unplayable.
They mean it in the sense of ‘i got bored of it and so did almost everyone else.’
Everyone heard ‘Pokemon with Guns!’, thought this was amusing, then played yet another open world survival crafting game with a gimmick.
multiplayer game that has no more players
‘i got bored of it and so did almost everyone else.’
Sounds like the same thing to me, unless you mean the servers would be down for the multiplayer game and nobody can play it anymore.
Basically yes, the last part of what you said:
A game that basically cannot be played without the existence of servers which are typically too complex or too expensive or outright banned from an average user with a decent internet connection acting as the server, that is a game that is ‘truly dead’, a game that is not really playable in single player whose multiplayer infrastructure no longer exists.
You can host a few people on your own minecraft or valheim or palworld server, or you can play the whole game single player, and the vast majority of gameplay systems and experiences work in single player.
Compared to say an MMO whose servers are just down, a live service game whose live service is now discontinued, a massive multiplayer fps that just no longer has any dedicated servers, etc.
Palworld is still a playable game getting updates from the devs and its multiplayer capacity still works.
It just is no longer wildly popular, which is again due to its nature of being yet another flavor of the week or month for twitch, yet another open world survival craft game with a goofy gimmick.
It is only dead in the sense of the collective zeitgeist moving on to something else once they got bored of it.
Popular gaming lingo does conflation or concepts with totally different meanings all of the time.
We’ve got ‘dead’ as in unpopular or less popular versus ‘dead’ as in literally unplayable due to lack of infrastructure.
