https://twitter.com/Palworld_EN/status/1834947171944485224
We are not changing our game’s business model, it will remain buy-to-play and not f2p or GaaS.
Kinda brutal the journalist didn’t mention that the quote they were taking was from an interview from several months ago.
Up you go, needs more visibility
How about finishing the damn thing and than,
Idk, making something new perhaps, dare I say, even original?
Is ~20k and dropping daily players enough to warrant a live service model? 🤔
Didn’t they make 10-100s millions of dollars on this? Pays a lot of salaries while you make new paid content.
EDIT : They made at least 12 million sales on steam, and had 7 million players on Xbox, which may be Gamepass, but still makes them money.
So at $30, that’s 66million from steam minus 30% for steams cut, so they banked 44 million at least.
They can pay 440 devs 100k for at least a year. I assume their team is a bit smaller than that, so they likely have years of runway. Linkedin lists size as between 50-200 in japan, so that likely means they are making $50-70k, and there are likely more than 100 devs. I would guess they have a 4 year runway from Steam sales, and maybe 1-2 year from Gamepass.
They got some time to think.
According to their careers page, they have about 60 employees. And, knowing japanese game dev salaries, a lot of those devs (excluding senior devs) probably make around 30-50k a year depending on seniority unless it’s a unicorn company.
Iirc they started paying their devs waaaay more after the game sold a ton.
Its honestly such a dead game at the moment, as in the world feels super empty and uninteresting. The pathing for the Pals is really bad too - trying to build a multistorey building is basically a nonstarter as they can’t really navigate up stairs.
Based on that you can get costumes/skins for your Pals, I’m pretty sure they’ll go live service with those as micro transactions.
It was a fun game for a few hours, but my god it was so fucking overrated. They had a lucky shot hitting the timing on the early access since Pokemon was just another terrible lazy cashgrab job, so practically anything that did even remotely better would get praised into oblivion.
And like 4 months later only 1% of the amount of peak players still remains. I don’t think they’ll ever get close to that peak again.
