I assumed when I saw Gabe, his cool wife Kara, and their rad scion Noah all playing Palworld they were all playing it together. I was wrong; each of them is playing in their own entirely separate worlds. It's exactly the kind of game they would play together, as they had Valheim - but no. They all wanna, like… chop that wood themselves? Or Rorschach themselves into some kind of industrial grade despot?

It seems like they've got Palworld covered, so I'm gonna try Enshrouded in the interim.

I spent a bunch of time yesterday trying to figure out what was even going on with the online conversation about Palworld generally. Some of it is actual jealousy, which I have nothing but sympathy for and must return as always to the Jane Austen quote. It makes sense as the industry is literally burning down that something akin to a remix of market-leading titles might, you know, rankle. We desperately need innovators. But we also need synthesizers, to codify and retain innovations. It is what it is.

I can't find any evidence that I believe suggesting that the product was made by AI, other than what felt like machine translated tweets from a major figure at the company about the power of AI in technology generally. It's getting to the point for me where the fight is just about the fight, resting on a number of assumptions I can't trace or prove.

It's become something part of the content cycle now, I can see everybody spinning the tumbler trying to wring the most out of their SEO to get some piece of the attention generated by seven million sales on Steam alone. Now that it's become something I have to have an opinion on, I have no interest. Luckily, you won't lack for content: it's not a choice on the sites. People have to talk about it. But if you would like to mostly avoid it in the future, you can come back here.

(CW)TB out.