“Spend as much money on indies as you can.”
Image credit: Pocketpair
Palworld community manager John “Bucky” Buckley has shared his thoughts on ‘dead games’, saying he believes it isn’t healthy for the industry to play the same game all the time if it wasn’t created with this sort of playstyle in mind.
Bucky first got involved in the ‘dead game’ discourse earlier this year, when he addressed Palworld’s player numbers. Palworld was the first big mega-hit of 2024, surpassing 2m concurrent players on Steam back in January. It was only the second game to ever achieve this, the other being PUBG. As expected, however, player numbers declined after release, as they do with many games. Palworld was then branded a ‘dead game’ in certain corners of the internet.
Speaking about this player dip back in February, Bucky acknowledged “there are so many amazing games out there to play”, and said people didn’t need to feel bad about trying something different.
“If you are still playing Palworld, we love you. If you’re no longer playing Palworld, we still love you, and we hope you’ll come back for round two when you’re ready,” he wrote on social media platform X.
Bucky has now further elaborated on this discussion during a recent conversation with YouTube channel Going Indie (thanks, PC Gamer).
“I don’t think it really serves anyone to kind of push gamers to just play the same game day in day out,” Bucky said. “There are games you can just play every single day for months on end and never burn out [such as] most MMOs, but they’re designed to be like that.”
The Palworld community manager went on to say there is now a certain ‘push’ for players to react this way to games that have not necessarily been created with long-term gameplay in mind.
With Palworld quickly approaching the 1-month mark, it’s interesting to look back at my own thoughts for launch.
In May of 2023, I was convinced that Palworld could break the 50,000 player mark. Anything above that seemed unobtainable though, and I certainly never expected it to… pic.twitter.com/1rZaV30QON
— Bucky | Palworld 🔜 Gamescom (@Bucky_cm) February 14, 2024
“I don’t think you need to be pushing yourself to play the same game all the time,” Bucky continued. “It’s not healthy for us, it’s not healthy for developers, it’s not healthy for gamers, it’s not healthy for gaming media.
“And it’s just not healthy for our industry, because the more we push this kind of narrative, the more very large companies are going to just say ‘gamers want more live service’.
“And we’re just going to get more of these really soulless live service games that come out then get shut down nine months later, 12 months later – because they’re not making enough money. And we all lose in that case.”
So, what does the Palworld developer suggest we do? Well, he just wants us all to support the games we want to support and enjoy the games we enjoy – it really doesn’t need to be more complicated.
“Play all the indies you can,” he said. “Spend as much money on indies as you can. Really, really support the guys who are trying to make fun games. Who cares if there’s only five people playing it? Just enjoy yourself. Just enjoy games. I don’t think it needs to be any more complex than that.”
You can check out the full video from Going Indie below.
As for Palworld’s future, the developer recently founded a new company known as Palworld Entertainment, which is designed to “accelerate the multifaceted global development” of the game and the brand’s further expansion.
