Our obsession with the concept of a “dead game” and player counts is unhealthy for the video game industry and gamers, said one Palworld creator.
Palworld, dubbed “Pokémon with guns,” launched in Early Access to record-breaking numbers. It’s the second most-played game on Steam, with an incredible 2,101,867 concurrent players on Valve’s platform. Only battle royale PUBG beats Palworld on Steam’s all-time list of most concurrently played games.
Palworld’s concurrent views on Steam have declined since its explosive launch earlier this year, now typically peaking in the tens of thousands rather than the millions. That decline has led some to call Palworld a “dead game,” but it’s not the only game to be called that in recent years.
For example, Rocksteady’s disastrous Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League, whose Steam concurrent user count typically peaks in the hundreds, was labeled a dead game upon its release. Arrowhead’s Helldivers 2, Ubisoft’s Skull & Bones, and Blizzard’s Overwatch 2 are also frequently labeled dead games. Sony’s live-action hero shooter Concord was labeled “dead on arrival” before launch due to low concurrent user counts in its Steam beta.
The “dead game” narrative is being exacerbated by an industry currently releasing more live-service games than the market can or even wants to support, and by publishers walking away from their live-service games amid low player counts. This month, Capcom announced plans to walk away from dinosaur-themed shooter Exoprimal just a year after its launch amid brutally low Steam concurrent user counts.
John “Bucky” Buckley, head of community at Pocketpair, creator of Palworld, has been outspoken in his criticism of the term “dead game” and has used social media posts to call on the industry, media, and gamers to abandon their obsession with simultaneity and player counts.
Bucky responded to these posts in an interview on YouTube We are becoming indie for the film titled “Dead games are a good thing. In it, Bucky called out publishers and developers who try to forcibly introduce mechanisms aimed at keeping players in a game they are not adapted to, calling it “unhealthy.”
“Just play the games you like,” Bucky said. “If you finish in a day, great. Good job. I’m glad you liked it. Play the next one.”
“I don’t think it serves anyone’s purpose to try to get players to play the same game day in and day out. There are games you can play every day for months and never get burned out. League of Legends, Dota, most MMOs, but they’re designed that way.
“Meanwhile, what we’re seeing now is a trend… I won’t necessarily say who’s trying to push this, but a lot more people are trying to get gamers to play games that aren’t really designed to be played for months on end, months on end.”
“I don’t think you need to force 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 that kind of narrative, the more we’re going to have really big companies just saying, ‘Gamers want more live services.’ And we’re just going to have more of these really soulless live service games that come out and then get shut down nine months later, 12 months later because they’re not making enough money. And we all lose out when that happens.”
“Play all the indies you can. Spend as much money on indies as you can. Who cares if it’s only five people playing? Just have fun. Just enjoy the games. I don’t think it needs to be any more complicated than that.”
But will the industry, media, and gamers listen? The “dead game” narrative is fueled in part by the video game industry’s obsession with secrecy. Unlike Hollywood, which releases movie budgets and box office results, video game publishers don’t announce video game sales or revenue unless they’re truly spectacular, and development budgets are almost always closely guarded secrets. In fact, it’s nearly impossible to know whether a video game has lived up to expectations, which is why so much attention is paid to vague comments publisher CEOs make in investor-facing earnings calls.
This secrecy means that gamers and media have only one publicly available performance metric to judge performance by: Steam concurrency. Valve continues to share this statistic with the world, so the world has developed an over-focus around it, which in turn leads to over-reliance.
In any case, there have been plenty of examples of live-service video games that ended up in the scrapheap prematurely. Ubisoft’s Rainbow Six Siege had a disastrous launch but went on to become one of the biggest live-service games of all time. Hello Games’ No Man’s Sky is another redemption story, as is CD Projekt’s Cyberpunk 2077. And let’s not forget the humble beginnings of Fortnite, which started out as a flat tower defense game but ended up being arguably the biggest live-service of them all.
Wesley is the UK News Editor for IGN. Find him on Twitter @wyp100. You can contact Wesley at wesley_yinpoole@ign.com or confidentially at wyp100@proton.me.
