Gonna say this as someone who has been critical of Game Freak both as a fan and as someone with a Pokémon SPIN for a while now:
Do not support Palworld.
The CEO of Pocket Pair, the game’s studio, openly supports AI and even made a game where making AI-generated art is its main mechanic.
Palworld is not Pocket Pair’s first instance of plagiarism, either. Their previous game, Craftopia, plagiarizes Breath of the Wild, whereas as its upcoming game, Never Grave: The Witch and The Curse, plagiarizes from independent developer Team Cherry’s game, Hollow Knight.
On top of stolen character models and concepts from fakemon artists, it’s already known that you can put Pals through what is basically slave labor BUT what’s been recently discovered is that the game allows you to capture and sell humans. This has been raising some red flags for black gamers looking into these mechanics, me included, considering this factors into the established slave labor system of Palworld.
TL;DR: I completely understand being tired of Game Freak and the Pokémon Company’s lack of polish over the years, but supporting something that is just as devoid of polish and even more devoid of ingenuity is not the way to make those criticisms clearer. This will only encourage more soullessness in the industry.
I implore you to support other creature collectors with some real passion behind them; I will reblog this post with recommendations shortly!
I think it's really funny that the whole meme of Palworld is making unethical sweatshops to put cute little creatures in to work them to death, but doing so in game is so incredibly inefficient because they will stop doing work under those conditions and their simple ai will accidentally go on strike and force the player to build ways for them to relax and be happy in order for them to work well again.
Replacing the overworked pals isn't really a good option either. Breeding them is expensive (you need cake which takes a lot of workload and ingredients), good workers take high quality spheres to capture which needs more resources (catch rates are low for good pals). There are drugs to make them better workers and not complain, but once again it's more expensive to make drugs than it is to just give them breaks and good working conditions. Also, because of raids, you need your Pals in good condition to defend your base and weak recently caught/bred pals will just get wiped out. In the end, the optimal way to run your base is by making sure everyone is happy and healthy.
Just find it pretty funny that despite how edgy the "pokemon with guns and capitalism" game is that in the end it always boils down to love and care get things done way better than cruel slave labor.
I have been mostly laughing at the salty Palworld haters raging over Palworlds success. But some of this outrage goes beyond the salty tantrums of corpo bootlickers crying over their favorite billion dollar mega franchise being parodied to out right slander.
So I stumbled onto a "news" article on twitter titled:
Now it goes without saying but cry baby concern trolls on twitter are not a legitimate source of evidence for anything. But it gets worse.
They decided to cite a post made by the companies ceo talking about the use of ai to generate Pokemon designs as "potentially damning" evidence that they used ai to create designs. However when you look into the details this obviously not the case.
They cite this post made by the creator as "evidence" that AI could have been used to make Pokemon designs.
Wow that looks pretty damning doesn't it? Except there is just one problem. The AI Pokemon designs were made by a BuzzFeed engineer and he was only commenting on how similar they looked to Pokemon designs. None of these fakemon designs was made by anyone using AI at Pocketpair.
Here's a link to the post with all of the fakemon designs made by Buzzfeed.
This is sinking to a all new low it's one thing to hate a game. It's another to spread slander against game developers because you don't like a video game. This is pathetic. Palworld haters spreading lies like this only makes me want to play Palworld more. I hope Palworld is released on every console so I can buy two copies for each.