It's been quite the year for survival games so far. Not even two months have passed in 2024 and not only have we had Palworld skyrocket past all expectations as one of the biggest releases in years, but we've also got Nightingale coming to Early Access in a matter of days, while older games like No Man's Sky, Rust, and Valheim continue to thrive. In spite of steep competition, Aaryn Flynn, the CEO of Inflexion Games - the developer behind Nightingale - believes the pool's big enough for everyone.
"I’ve said this to a few folks," Flynn told me, "one of the things that is so remarkable about survival crafting is that there is no set template right now. With shooters, it was Capture the Flag for a long time, then came Battle Royale, and that became the template. Survival Crafting doesn’t have that - within a month you would have had a pokemon-esq capture game where you automate your base with their work, to a really cool fantasy action adventure game where you’ve got voxels to build with, to our Victorian fantasy game where you jump through portals in first person combat."
When asked specifically about Palworld, and if the team at Nightingale had learned anythring from or had thoughts on Pocketpair's underdog hit, Flynn offered praise to the team, as well as expression his own personal uncertainty regarding the matter of Palworld's originality.
If you told me at the start of the year that Palworld would break Steam records, I would've done a hearty "no no" chuckle. But here we are, with the survival game exceeding 19 million players and Pocketpair probably wondering how they managed such a feat. With its success has come the inevitable slew of impatient people saying the game's dead because it's not received updates fast enough, or folks saying it's lost a hefty percentage of its player base, and others saying its viewership numbers over on streaming services have plummeted. Palworld's community manager Bucky has gently reminded folks that not only is this discourse "lazy", but to play other games instead.
Good news, that special Xbox podcast that’ll see Phil Spencer and co give us all an update on the console maker’s future plans is set to take place later today, February 15. As you’d expect, Microsoft staff were given their own update last week, via a meeting which reportedly included enough Palworld to genuinely surprise people.
We’d already heard a few snippets about what went down at this townhall, with the main one being that Xbox doesn’t have any plans to stop making video game boxes. Now though, Inverse’s Shannon Liao has reported some more details about what went on, and how Xbox staffers reacted to the things their bosses outlined.
According to Liao’s report, the meeting featured Palworld being shown off via a huge range of different devices, to the extent that staff were apparently genuinely surprised to see so much of the game. Why, you ask? Well, it was reportedly part of a plan to demonstrate one of the things Xbox president Sarah Bond told those in attendance, this being that: “Every screen is an Xbox.”
