John Buckley, community manager of PocketPair, the team behind Palworld, has had his say on live services and their success, warning users that playing the same games over and over again is essentially not good for either players or the industry.
Speaking in a video posted by YouTube channel Going Indie, Buckley also commented on the fact that many consider Palworld a “dead” game because its user base has plummeted since launch, hitting 2 million, but explained that it’s not actually a game that plans to have that many players constantly online.
Basically, Palworld is not a live service game and is still in development as it is in early access, so the drop in players is not only not worrying but is simply normal.
A loss for everyone
Not only that: according to the community manager, no game in theory should continue to attract such a quantity of players on a constant basis, because this brings damage both to the players and to the entire market.
“I don’t think we should be stuck playing the same game all the time,” Buckley said. “It’s not healthy for us, it’s not healthy for developers, it’s not healthy for players, and it’s not healthy for the gaming media.”
In essence, according to Buckley, the tendency to always return to the same games “is not healthy for our industry, because it leads to always pushing the same type of game according to a narrative imposed by the big companies that limit themselves to thinking that players only want live service anyway”.
“And then we end up with these soulless live services that come out and then shut down within 9-12 months because they can’t make enough money, and then we all end up losing out,” explained PocketPair’s community manager.
Buckley then recommends trying a large quantity and variety of games, “playing as much as possible” and maybe focusing on indies. It is also a vision that he had already expressed previously, precisely in response to the usual question about the decline in active players in Palworld, but the statements make a lot of sense.
