How Palworld Drew So Many Players Remains A Mystery For Its DevsUnderstanding why a hit game, especially an indie title, becomes a sensation can be valuable for the gaming community. It may provide insights into what elements contribute to a game's success. However, success does not always follow a specific formula, and even the developers may not fully be aware of the true reasons behind their game's popularity.An example in this case is Pocketpair's hit open-world monster-hunting game Palworld, which has over 32 million players across all platforms in the first year since it was released in Early Access in January 2024.John "Bucky" Buckley, the game's global community manager, talked about how the game attracted so many players during this year's Game Developer's Conference panel. He frankly said, "I don't know, please don't ask me. I know someone will ask me after, but I promise you we don't know the answer. "Surprisingly, this stunning achievement of selling eight million copies merely six days after its launch isn't as a source of happiness for developers as I thought it would be. "Within that first week, we hit this disgusting number that makes me feel sick when I see it... It really was unbelievable, and just seeing this today still kind of freaks me out. " Buckley recalled the panic situation when the player count kept soaring at launch, which was definitely out of expectation from the team who thought the game would only attract mainly Japanese players' attention, "That's when things started to get weird."Only a month after the launch, the game acquired 25 million players, and following that, the team barely talked about the player's numbers until the recent news of 32 million players. There are a few reasons, "basically the short version is that there were some bad vibes coming, and these bad vibes convinced us to stop marketing for a while and go a little bit quiet." One of the facts that resulted in the bad vibes was the game's nickname, "Pokemon with guns," which made the developers feel uneasy.The lawsuit from the Pokmon developer arrived in September of last year, as was bound to happen eventually. Although Nintendo may not be interested in what makes the game successful, it is certainly protective of its copyrights and takes legal action under the belief that the game infringes on its patents, which were only filed after Palworld's release.For the development team, where nearly everyone is a huge fan, "it was a very depressing day" when the lawsuit was filed. Buckley described that "everyone heads down and walking in the rain." The lawsuit has changed much of the team's plan, including scaling back the Tokyo Game Show and "hiring security guards."@Palworld_EN