Recently, the atmosphere in the gaming circle has been a little weird. Open a few live broadcast platforms at random, and it is not difficult for us to see a group of game anchors tirelessly enslaving the unknown creatures on the screen, with expressions that are three points treacherous and seven points excited, with a hint of obscenity. In the community, players are doing in-depth research on issues such as "Palu's hybridization and sustainability efforts", and their performance in the game is not evil, or at least angry. Behind all this, there is not only the degradation of morality, but also the distortion of human nature. And the root of all evil is a game called "Phantom Beast Palu".
On January 19th, "Phantom Beast Palu" was officially launched, and the gear of fate that I don't know how many people turned again. The developer of this game is called "pocketpair", and there are only 40 people in the whole staff, and only 4 people are in charge of "Phantom Beast Palu". Before the game was launched, no one expected that this "Phantom Beast Palu" would go all the way up and successfully detonate the game circle at the beginning of 2024, and by the way, the cyber electronic merit list of countless players directly became - . It is recommended to urgently rush to make the immeasurable merits and let the Palu players have a copy, so as not to be a hell man in the ** shed after a few decades.
On January 26, "Phantom Beast Palu" officially released a congratulatory picture, celebrating the game's sales of more than 8 million copies on the Steam platform in 6 days, counting the Xbox platform and special players, the total number of players properly exceeded 10 million. TGA founder and host Geoff Keighley posted an article expressing his shock, revealing that he had confirmed with developer PocketPair that this sales figure does not actually include Xbox and Game Pass sales, but only Steam sales. According to Geoff Keighley, this means that Paloo the Phantom Beast will sell about 1$8.9 billion.
On the Steam platform, the peak number of Phantom Beast Palu exceeded 2.1 million, and popular free-to-play games such as PUBG, Dota 2, and CS:GO were all killed by it. At the same time, an is taking place within the game's community. Although the controversy has not completely stopped, it does not prevent tens of millions of players from indulging in it and unable to extricate themselves.
Take hell
The reason why Phantom Beast Palu can become the first phenomenal game in 2024, and it is also from the hands of a small workshop, is mainly due to its stitching of a series of well-known games such as "Pokémon" and "ARK: Survival Evolved". However, this stitching also puts the developer on the edge of the cliff. Among them, "ARK: Survival Evolved" is an open-world survival game, and there are many similar works, so it is a bit difficult to break plagiarism. But Nintendo, as one of the largest game manufacturers in the industry, "Pokémon" is so famous, and the behavior of "Phantom Beast Palu" is equivalent to directly jumping the face of the industry boss, and the latter has the "No. 1 Legal Department in the Eastern Hemisphere".
Therefore, many people who eat melons are looking forward to the arrival of Nintendo's heavenly soldiers, and Takuro Tsubabe (president of PocketPair) will surrender. However, what is surprising is that in the face of this extremely arrogant face-jumping behavior, the "First Legal Department of the Eastern Hemisphere" chose to lie down, except for warning the Pokémon mod author and issuing a statement that it was being studied, basically nothing was done. According to the analysis of netizens who know more Japanese, Nintendo's statement actually does not mean to sue pocketpair, but more to deal with netizens who are not too big to watch the excitement and jump up and down. This does make some sense, if Nintendo really has the idea of suing PocketPair, when "Genesis Ideal Township" is launched in 2020, PocketPair should not escape the lawyer's letter.
In fact, Nintendo not only did not target game developers, but also indirectly promoted the success of "Phantom Beast Palu". As one of the most well-known game IPs in the world, the reputation of the "Pokémon" game is not very good, and its developer "Game Freak" can be called the king of rottenness, "Pokémon games are getting more and more rubbish", "Game Freak is not enterprising" and other negative comments emerge in endlessly. And for the feedback of a large number of players, gf didn't listen to a word, anyway, the game sales are there, you can make trouble, sell less and I will lose. Now, there are finally manufacturers willing to come out to dance Nintendo and torture gf, and countless Pokémon players are almost eating pot pulp and welcoming the king.
He's not a mess
Although it has been ridiculed for plagiarism by many people, from an objective point of view, pocketpair is not simply and rudely "borrowed", and their borrowing and stitching are not borrowed and sewn randomly, but prepared. "Phantom Beast Palu" is a good blend of "Palu" and "business and construction" gameplay. When seeing a large number of Palu logging, mining, planting and striking iron in the game world, players will inevitably feel some ** pleasure in their hearts. Moreover, PocketPair has indeed made a lot of optimizations and improvements to the gameplay, and many details are even better than what we have done.
At the same time, the optimization of PocketPair is also good, "Phantom Beast Palu" has beaten the 720p 30fps "Pokémon" on the switch in terms of picture quality, realizing "horses can run on rides, dragons can ride and fly" and "Poké balls catch people", and answer the questions left over from history such as "Can Pokémon be eaten" and "Human life is precious and life is expensive". This set of combos down,"Pokémon" players should give pocketpair a living shrine,What's the point of just 108 yuan,This family not only sells the game casually for three or four hundred,And the game is exclusive.,You have to buy a switch before playing.,That thing can be sold for as little as two thousand.。 The performance of the key switch is stretched to the extreme, and it is not too much to say that it should be thrown into the trash, which seriously drags down the experience.
In the community and external communication, we can notice that in fact, the integration of Pokémon and business building gameplay in "Phantom Beast Palu" is the key to attracting a large number of players to play this game, at least in China, after all, Chinese players have a small number of switches. Most people don't buy "Phantom Beast Palu" specifically for the purpose of torturing gf, but want to feel the thrill of cyber slave owners in "Phantom Beast Palu", and experience the Pokémon-like gameplay by the way.
Is it a success?
Seeing this, you may think that "Phantom Beast Palu" is a pretty good quality work. However, even though its number of players has been counted in the tens of millions, there are still many people who have not let go of doubts about "Phantom Beast Palu". Many people believe that a team of four people, who can sell tens of millions of copies by stitching and going viral, will have an immeasurable negative impact on those who devote themselves to the game and polish the masterpiece. Maybe in the future, the industry will all rely on this kind of money-making enterprises, and the whole industry will eat jujube pills!
But I would say that such fears are unnecessary. Rather, is there still less manufacturers in the industry who copy and stitch? It seems that manufacturers who make a lot of money by stitching are not uncommon. Among them, there are many manufacturers who make money by borrowing games, and finally buy the original factory in turn, and there are countless examples. I'm really worried about the bad atmosphere in the game industry, I should have started worrying about it 20 years ago. And, is the current climate in the gaming industry really good? Or is it my delusion, since the beginning of the mask, most game manufacturers seem to be more professional than games, and big factories are more diligent than turning over. The fact that a trillion-scale industry can be made into a "pill" by four people can only mean that it itself should almost be buried.
Moreover, there are so many stitched games on the market, why can "Phantom Beast Palu" successfully win tens of millions of sales? Of course, there is a certain element of luck, but the main reason is that the game developers are not simply copying and borrowing, but do play their own tricks on it. The president of PocketPair said that in his personal opinion, "Phantom Beast Palu" and "Pokémon" are not so similar, but are actually two games. Although there is an element of coping with this, there is also some truth to it, most players really don't think of "Phantom Beast Palu" as the PC version of "Pokémon", it has its own unique place.
Write at the end
A few days ago, many players were still expecting that the number of people in "Phantom Beast Palu" could break the record of "PUBG" that year. Now, it's still hanging after all. Palu Beast may well be a short-lived game, and its peak is behind us, but the tens of millions of players are still strong enough to leave a mark in gaming history.