Pushing Buttons: Why Palworld leaves me cold

The biggest story of the year so far in games has been Palworld, the "Pokémon-with-guns" early access game that broke and rebroke concurrent player records on PC. It's showing a few signs of being unsustainable, as those player numbers have dropped off in recent weeks and the developers reveal the eye-watering cost of keeping servers online for so many people (almost 6m a year), but it's still in with a shot of being 2024's biggest game in terms of pure revenue. There's something a little unsavoury about Palworld that has other developers and critics wrinkling their noses. It's not just the ick of turning guns on creatures that are, unlike Minecraft's blocky animals, designed to look cute. Its character designs are so close to Pokémon's that it has sparked allegations of plagiarism, with some 3D models of the game's creatures aligning improbably closely with those from recent Pokémon games.