01-26-2024, 12:12 PM
Palworld is a new game developed by the Japanese game development company PocketPair. In the English speaking world, the game has received a lot of attention for being "Pokemon with Guns." This meme came as a surprise to the CEO of PocketPair, Takuro Mizobe, because Palworld is a self-described open world survival crafting game that is in his eyes more similar to many other games before you get to Pokemon. He has compared it to or explicitly said inspiration was drawn from Pokemon, ARK: Survival Evolved, Dragon Quest, Rust, Grand Theft Auto, Rimworld, Minecraft, and probably more. The game has become an explosive success, achieving 8 million sales in less than 6 days, and is currently occupying the top spot for most concurrent players on Steam. If having the most concurrent players of a Steam game were a contest, it would hold second place for the all time record, with PUBG maintaining a comfortable lead.
With this success has come much controversy on X.com, with many posts calling the people at PocketPair and Takuro Mizobe plagiarists, parasites, cheaters, bootleggers, etc. and calling for the legal intervention of Nintendo. Many posts have been written in response to these people calling them all sorts of mean names as well. Scanning through arguments and profiles you can quickly piece together that this basically another fight between SJWs and knights, being anti and pro-Palworld respectively. The purpose of this thread is to talk about both Palworld and this ongoing discourse. To start the discussion off I'll write some ideas about the history and philosophy behind PocketPair and Mizobe, and then some ideas on what is motivating the anti-Palworld side of discourse. In the interest of completeness, I will summarize the pro-Palworld side as knights who either have chips on their shoulder about Pokemon and Gamefreak, or are reacting to libtards saying obviously silly things, or "just want to let people enjoy things, man." Just like with everything else they accept their opposition's self-flattering framing at face value and then react to that very stupidly. I will leave it there, but if you have your own thoughts on these knights feel free to talk about them.
Takuro Mizobe graduated from the Tokyo Institute of Technology in 2012 and quickly began working for JP Morgan Securities. In 2014, he founded an online crypto exchange, and after making some money in crypto he founded PocketPair. He's a technical guy with a personal interest in games.
Palworld is PocketPair's 3rd major release and it's 4th game overall. It's 2nd major release, Craftopia, sold 600,000 copies. This success left the 10 person company with a decently sized war chest and enough media attention that we can start to understand what ideas are driving Mizobe.
https://wired.jp/article/why-stay-indepe...ro-mizobe/
The kind of games that Mizobe makes are chimeras that don't hide that they are chimeras. A combination of things that he liked from other games. Combining two different things that are appealing on their own but would create something unique when put together. He finds this to be challenging work, and the more games you try to put together the more difficult it becomes. He compares it to mash-ups in music, but also compares it to the philosophy that was common in web services. These quotes were translated using Google Translate.
Takuro Mizobe Wrote:"Copying is commonplace in the world of web services, and for example, Facebook easily copied Google's Circles feature from Google+. Other examples of how the world's largest companies are copying each other's web content include Instagram copying its Stories feature from Snapchat, Twitter copying Clubhouse's voice feature and developing its Spaces feature, and It's a world of services. In the first place, ``STORYS.JP'', which I started, ended up being a different company, but the original motivation was to ``create a Japanese version of LinkedIn.'' I think the same is true in the world of games. Many fighting games follow the UI of Street Fighter II, and many card games are influenced by Hearthstone. Famous indie games in particular are often strongly influenced by past masterpieces. I believe that culture develops through imitation."
He also contrasts his philosophy with the philosophy of Nintendo.
Takuro Mizobe Wrote:"I've always loved Nintendo games, and that hasn't changed. I also deeply respect him. However, when it comes to making games, Nintendo has a strong philosophy of creating new and unique games with high quality, and this was questioned at the Nintendo Game Seminar. On the other hand, I have a deep-rooted desire for my work to be enjoyed by as many people as possible, and to that end, if there are good ideas in the world, I pick them up, and I don't necessarily have to be particular about originality. I'm thinking about it. I want to make it more casually, or rather, I want to make it more casually. I think it would be a good idea to create things in a way that just jumps on what is trendy (lol)."
I don't think that Mizobe has any delusions that he is going to be the next Kojima. Again, this is a technical guy with an interest in video games, not an artist. Whether that's out of laziness or a belief that he couldn't even make it there if he tried is not for me to say. But I think that his enjoyment of games and making them comes through clearly. To contradict Mizobe, he says he doesn't have any artistic vision but I don't think that's as true as he would believe. He describes himself as a trend chaser that wants to appeal to the interest of others, but I've noticed that as he has jumped from project to project there are specific things he has kept an interest in and wishes to emphasize. Palworld is arguably a mashup that uses his previous game Craftopia, a game in which you could own pets. Palworld emphasizes and explores this idea after he found the limited ability to interact with pets in Craftopia to be much more interesting than he had anticipated. PocketPair's next project is a 2D action game, but still shares common threads of town building and having monsters under your command.
Palworld as a discourse and controversy quickly began after the release of the game. It started with the perception that Palworld has creatures come close to infringing Nintendo's copyright, and comparisons and arguments about the two rosters multiplied from there. Here is a link to the most comprehensive and popular list of comparisons. If any individual comparison in this thread grabs your attention you will probably find the comments interesting as well. Then the discussion moved to the claim that these designs were being made with generative AI. The evidence in favor of this is that Mizobe is very open to using generative AI in games, and Pocket Pair had made a game called AI Art Impostor to explore this interest. It's impossible for generative AI to have been used in Palworld in this way, but because AI is a hot-button issue for a certain type of person it is at this point that I believe that the conversation moved from a small controversy to the standard culture war we're so used to seeing. Palworld is no longer a game or even an act of theft, it is a mortal threat to artists and creatives everywhere.
Lastly, people with access to Blender have gone into the games files and accused the PocketPair of stealing models from Gamefreak and then changing them. It would be negligent for me to not include these claims in this mini-history, but I can't comment on how true they are. I'll simply point out that the desire to compare the models directly came after the controversy, not the other way around. But, if it can be undeniably proven that the models are stolen in the way these people claim, PocketPair owes The Pokemon Company a very large check.
Rather than comparing individual creatures, or comparing inspiration to plagiarism (it annoys me that this specific word is only being used because of a video made by HBomberGuy), I think the closest this discourse has gotten to productive is directly comparing PocketPair and Palworld to specific indie games. What is the difference between Palworld and Bug Fables or Project Wingman? These are games that are meant to appeal to an audience that played very specific games and invoke experiences they've already had. Why are Shovel Knight and Pizza Tower not mash-ups in the same vein as Palworld and Craftopia? I've stumbled upon a freelancer who sells legally distinct "Zelda-inspired plush dolls" on Etsy to provide me with an answer.
So the badness of Palworld can be attributed to its cynicism, and the fact that a very large profit was made. No one at PocketPair is particularly interested in anything they are taking from. Maybe I've been too generous to Mizobe and his game where you hold left click on trees, but I wanted to make sure his sincerity comes through. This claim that Palworld was made by malicious actors who saw guaranteed cash is essentially a mass hallucination. We also have the blog post about the game's strange development cycle to attest to this. What kind of money making plan involves porting your code from Unity to Unreal Engine mid-development and then selling it for a one time payment that's still less than half the price of a normal major release?
https://www.eurogamer.net/is-palworld-actually-any-good-of-course-not
Chris Tapsell Wrote:"I'm still trying to reverse-engineer this one, so let's pull back a tiny bit further. The real problem with Palworld is less the derivative approach itself, than it is it's total shamelessness. It might be oddly refreshing to be so open about your cynicism, but it also has an impact on the player. Play Palworld and you won't feel like you're playing something made with thought, or craft, or an earnest team's best intentions. You won't feel admiration or wonder. You won't feel any real sense of achievement. You won't feel like any artist has been involved, or that anything meaningful might come to mind. You will instead feel like you're playing a product designed to be sold, rather than to be played. You will feel like a mark. And you'll be right."
So this is the belief that is at the root of why Palworld must be driven from polite society, and it's also not true. At most they're basing it post hoc off of the same quote about Nintendo that I linked to earlier. So why do they believe in it strongly enough to talk about it for days on end? Is it that Mizobe and these people are essentially the same, and seeing their reflection honestly for the first time destroys them? Is it resentment for being beaten at their own game by a "tech bro?" Do they believe that making an ARK clone is only something you would do if you wanted to take advantage of stupid people? Is it the anti-Japanese racism that's around all the time? Has their opposition to AI has forced them into increasingly absurd positions? Does social media just make them stupid? What do you all think?
One last note: After reading through these posts for long enough I can confidently say that "slop" is no longer a word for knights on 4chan, it's for everyone. Even in the current era, the rest of the world remains downstream of them.