Palworld’s Arrival on PlayStation 5 Opens Up an Obvious Opportunity to Reach Even More Players

The infamous Palworld has recently dropped on PlayStation consoles, much to the surprise of many in the gaming community. The game, which has made headlines in the past few weeks thanks to a nebulous Nintendo lawsuit, was previously only available on PC and Xbox, where it found an unexpectedly robust audience.

It doesn’t take a gaming historian to see the similarities between Palworld and another major franchise: Pokémon. Palworld adopts the monster-collecting premise of Nintendo’s world-famous IP, but takes it in a radically different, somewhat more disturbing direction, as players essentially use Pals, the game’s equivalent of Pokémon, for slave labor and visceral combat encounters. But it’s this unique approach to the monster-collecting formula, once dominated by Nintendo, that makes Palworld so appealing to many players: the constant forward momentum of the survival genre, which enshrouds Palworld, coupled with an emphasis on deeper, real-time combat, has helped the game flourish in spite of its obvious, legally dubious connections to Nintendo. With Palworld now available on PlayStation 5, it looks like it could be reaching a wider audience than ever.

Palworld On PlayStation Plus Seems Like a No-Brainer

Palworld was a day-one Game Pass release, which was a considerable factor in its success. Coming from a studio with virtually no track record and with a pre-release public image defined by its similarity to Pokémon, Palworld could have easily been destined for irrelevance, relegated to the realm of cheap knock-offs and dime-a-dozen survival games. Indeed, the game existed as more of a meme than a highly anticipated title in the public eye ahead of its release; the “Pokemon, but with guns” premise did enough to capture players’ attention, but its grasp could have been tenuous.

Of course, Palworld wound up selling incredibly well on Steam and Xbox storefronts as well—its success can’t be chalked up solely to its inclusion in Game Pass. But it’s hard to deny that lowering the game’s cost of entry for millions of Game Pass subscribers helped its word-of-mouth marketing. Such an absurd idea is bound to make people perk up their ears, and giving it away for a mere $10 a month subscription fee allowed players to sink their teeth into its surprisingly fun combat and settlement-building mechanics, thereby increasing its visibility and solidifying it as a title worth paying attention to. History may be able to repeat itself, but now within Sony’s ecosystem.

Survival Games Like Palworld Are a Good Match for Games-On-Demand Services

Most people know about Palworld at this point, so it’s not like it needs the publicity boost that PlayStation Plus Extra could offer, but such a move could still increase its player base on PS5. A number of survival games, including The Long Dark and Conan Exiles, have thrived on Sony’s subscription service, at least in part because of the nature of the genre. Successful survival games dig their claws into the player, hooking them within the first few minutes through satisfying progression systems that make the prospect of dozens of hours of gameplay seem reasonable. These games, especially those that receive regular updates like Palworld, require players to get addicted to the gameplay loop early on, convincing them to stick with it for the long haul; a lot of them don’t truly get started until at least ten hours in.

Thus, by offering a low-commitment entry point like a games-on-demand subscription service, games like Palworld can cultivate an even greater audience of dedicated players, players that will either extend their subscription or take the plunge and buy the game when it gets removed from the service. This is particularly helpful for those still on the fence about the game or not particularly interested in the survival space, as they are the least likely to shell out $30 for the whole product, at least not before trying it first.