It’s been very self evident to anyone that’s been paying attention that Palworld’s stated sales numbers cannot possibly be real.
I’ve been going into this forever, but the idea that Palworld could move 40,000,000 units makes no sense. A game that popular would be a legit cultural phenomenon, and yet all we’ve see are no name streamers hyping it up to grift off of the Pokemon controversy. The player count seems to be botted (Which is why the game is primarily played in china) and there simply isn’t enough real word interest to see this as being a relevant Pokemon competitor.
So what gives?
The claim has always been that Palworld has had massive sales success on steam (Conveniently no where else) and that as a result of that it has become extremely popular. Palworld released their stupid little JPEG images claiming that they keep selling more and more units, and their audience blindly believes it. Because, after all, they couldn’t possibly be lying… right?
The sales numbers, we know, came straight from Palworld. And everyone universally assumed that, because they were coming from the company, that they had to be reliable. But that isn’t necessarily the case. Because Pocket Pair is a privately held company, they have no obligation to be honest with their sales numbers. As none of their claims are verified by sources outside the company (And in fact, are contradicted by Steam’s best seller page) I think it’s safe to say that Palworld’s sales numbers are completely FAKE.
So there are a couple of things we need take away from this: First of all, I never want to hear about games that are ‘popular in China.’ Most of these games are heavily botted, and China itself heavily restricts games made outside the country from gaining traction there. In other words China does not allow competition. If Nintendo was allowed to sell there like any other company you would see very quickly that they are far more popular than the biggest Chinese games. (In fact, this is already true… all of my Chinese friends love Nintendo, but have to get their games through alternative means)
Secondly- we cannot rely on games journos like Geoff Keighley to accurately report on sales numbers. After years of ignoring Pokemon’s enduring popularity and success, Geoff came out and ‘verified’ Palworld’s sales numbers with a phone call to Palworld’s CEO. Obviously this isn’t cutting edge journalism, but I suspect Geoff knew exactly what he was doing. Palworld actually premiered at A Game Awards event, and Geoff must have known that if he contributed to the grift that it would give his show the illusion that it can ‘create’ real stars in the industry.
We saw similar situation with the industry rallying about The Last of Us HBO, Expedition 33, and Balldo’s Gate 3. We were told that these were the biggest, most successful releases ever, and the simple reality was that it wasn’t true. The Last of Us was easily outperformed by the Super Mario Bros movie (But Geoff gave the best film adaption award to TLOU) Expedition 33 was hyped as the ‘best JRPG in years’ (When real fans of the genre don’t even really consider it a JRPG) and Balldo’s Gate 3 was hyped as having outsold Zelda. (It did not)
It’s become a trend now for these people to brazenly lie about Nintendo consoles and how successful their games are. Even now, you have a lot of people trying to bury Splatoon Raiders, or failing that trying to say it’s the ‘first’ major release on Nintendo Switch 2. Situations like Palworld happen because the industry is so desperate to find something, anything, to positively compare to Nintendo. It’s become a trend lately to see games that no one cares about (Such as Astrobot) praised as the absolute pinnacle of their genre when in reality the Nintendo equivalents outperform it both critically and commercially. Astrobot won GOTY, was glazed as an absolute masterpiece… but Bananza eclipsed it in relevancy not even a full year later.
There is this industry expectation that Nintendo is behind the times or out of touch but the reality is very different. Other companies, like Palworld, rip off Nintendo’s patented innovations and try to make them their own. What’s interesting though is how these tactics that were very prevalent in the 90’s and 2000’s no longer work.
It’s kind of shocking to see how Pokemon has grown into this huge cultural phenomenon, but the narrative back in the 90’s was that Final Fantasy VII was far more relevant, culturally speaking. Not only was this not true, the narrative continued for decades with games like Digimon, Yo-kai Watch, and now Palworld all being killed as “pokemon killer’ even as Pokemon continues to break new ground as a true cultural landmark.
The narrative, at least at the moment, is that Pokemon is stale and boring and that Palworld has freshened up the formula. But Palworld, at its core, is just a third person shooter. Another third person shooter exists on Nintendo hardware, Splatoon Raiders, and has already significantly outperformed Palworld by every metric. I find it interesting how the narrative that is Palworld is better than Pokemon because it is a third person shooter… while they conveniently ignore the third person shooter IP that already exists on Nintendo hardware.
In essence, the pro – Palworld people believe that Pokemon should become something it isn’t, and they are doing this in an attempt to destroy the brand and its success. For the industry at large, defending Palworld and protecting the truth about its sales from getting exposed had nothing to do with Palworld. It was all about destroying Pokemon.
Once the grift around Palworld collapses (In my ways it already has) the industry is going to immediately move on to the next thing. They will not acknowledge that Pokemon won, they will simply move onto the next controversy and prepare themselves for the next ‘Pokemon killer.’
If Palworld really was great- people would have hyped it up on its own merits, not endlessly try and pretend as if it were better and sold more than Pokemon. Not only was it a fool’s errand, but in the end resulted in the entire project becoming kind of a joke. Ten years from now we will be mocking Palworld the same way we mock Yo-Kai Watch and Temtem today- if not more so. The idea that Palworld was bigger or more successful than Pokemon simply was not true, and that can be clearly seen by simply going outside and looking around.