Palworld fans have been obsessively trying to gaslight people into believing that Pokemon fans are raging and seething about Palworld, when in actuality not a single person is really all that invested at all. Whenever they talk about Pokemon fans endlessly seething about Palworld- they inevitably end up talking about me. A content creator who has made a career talking about industry trends. Although I have done very little in regards to Palworld coverage, I have been blocked by both Bucky and Palworld_EN and have been endlessly harassed on social media. As of this writing, I have not even uploaded a youtube video covering the controversy yet.
The reason for this is because Palworld has very obviously crashed and burned. Palworld fans are obsessed with pushing this narrative that Palworld ‘won’ the lawsuit that they’re ‘beating’ Pokemon and that fans of Pokemon are mad about it. The simple reality is that these people don’t really exist. Palworld fans are hardcore projecting about what’s actually happening here. They keep insisting that Pokemon fans are harassing them for liking Palworld. In reality, it has always been them aggressively going after Pokemon fans in a desperate attempt for attention. Simply put, the Palworld community keeps trying to shill Palworld in a desperate attempt to shill Pokemon. But in order to deflect from this very obvious fact, they have this tendency to accuse Pokemon fans of being mad at the concept of other monster catching games existing. Which is a claim that simply isn’t true, considering how no one has ever had a problem with Digimon/Yo-Kai Watch/Dragon Quest Monsters or any of the other competitors that exist.
What makes Palworld different?
Traditionally, fans of other monster catching games understood that they needed their own identity and brand separate from Pokemon. Digimon has a lot of superficial similarities to Pokemon- but at the end of the day it’s a completely different brand with a completely different style and focus. In fact, I’m not even sure I would say it’s the same genre… traditionally Digimon was more like a pet simulator than a monster collecting game. Palworld, on the other hand, tried very hard to make itself as similar to Pokemon as possible (Complete with completely plagiarized designs and concepts) and attempted this stange smear campaign where they tried to pretend that they were ‘better’ than Pokemon.
The campaign did not work to convert Pokemon fans, but it was very effective on the sort of person who hates Nintendo and Pokemon and wants to see them fail. So a lot of Youtubers and content creators in the west looking to grift latched onto this game and fought very hard to gaslight everyone into thinking this was some massive success story, and that it was way more popular and successful than Pokemon itself. In fact, it’s very common for these people to come out and pretend to be ‘jaded’ Pokemon fans who are much happier with Palworld.
“I’m a huge Pokemon fan but Pokemon fans are crazy! Palworld is way better.”
This is very obviously a ruse if you look into it even a little bit. When you have these people citing being huge fans of gen 1 or Pokemon Stadium, it really establishes this sense that they’ve been completely out of touch with the brand that Pokemon has turned into. Instead of being honest with themselves and admitting they aren’t really fans and don’t really engage with what Pokemon has turned into, the narrative has always been that Pokemon has ‘fell off’ and that it’s this massively mismanaged brand.
What is actually happening is that these people jumped onto a trend, left for the next shiny thing, and are upset at the real fans who stuck around and still enjoy Pokemon. The common narrative that people have that Pokemon ‘doesn’t innovate’ doesn’t make a whole lot of sense even if you look at the mainline releases. Every new Pokemon generation introduces a new setting, mechanics, and features that allow for hundreds of hours of playtime.
It was a common talking point initially that Pokemon would never have base building or construction the way Palworld did. And what happened? Pokopia comes out, and does a way better job of being a town building simulator. The entire core argument that mainline Pokemon was stale, derivative, and uninspired always failed to account for the wildly different spin offs that were not even developed by Game Freak. How, exactly, is Pokemon always the same thing over and over again when it goes to such extreme lengths to offer such a wide range of experiences?
The core problem with the Anti-Pokemon Crowd is that they have no interest in celebrating the brand or its accomplishments and simply want to sit around and bitch incessantly about it because he’s been such a staple among Nintendo fans for the past thirty years. They’re not really pokemon fans- they don’t want to play the games and they certainly don’t want to engage with the brand past the surface level. What they want to destroy the brand so they can put anything else in its place.
The hype around Palworld has nothing to do with Palworld itself. We saw similar hype cycles around TemTem and Yo-Kai Watch. What we’re seeing is the industry attempting to rally to destroy Pokemon, and Nintendo along with it. But what’s also becoming readily apparent is that no matter how many Youtubers try and shill for Palworld- no matter how many of them come together to try and push this narrative- the simle fact of the matter is that all of them combined do not have the influence to sway actual Pokemon fans. Especially since the actual Pokemon community is perfectly happy playing new Pokemon games, and in all likelihood aren’t even aware that Palworld exists.
Palword hype genuinely does not seem to exist outside of Twitter. Bots keep regurgitating the same talking points over and over again about how Pokemon fans are mad about Palworld doing well, but it simply isn’t true. No matter what happens- Palworld will never ‘beat’ Pokemon. It has already failed at that. All of the attempts the industry has made to glaze Palworld while demonizing Nintendo will, in all likelihood, simply cause more people to start noticing the pattern when the next ‘Pokemon Killer’ launches in the next five years.