After revealing that the long-awaited 1.0 release of Palworld is coming next year, Pocketpair global community manager John “Bucky” Buckley has been responding to feedback online – including criticism of the survival game’s “Early Access” label.
Responding directly to journalist Chris Scullion, who wrote that he wishes developers “could ditch the ‘Early Access’ gimmick” as titles like Palworld are popular enough to be perceived as full releases, Bucky explains he doesn’t “quite get the correlation between early access and number of players here.” The online thread continues, with Bucky describing why Pocketpair decided to launch Palworld into Early Access.
“Palworld is early access because we launched it early with the express purpose of gathering feedback to make the game even better,” writes the dev. “We’ve taken so much of that feedback on board and made many changes to suit what our players want. We’re not silly enough to think we know best. Our players are constantly coming up with ideas and suggestions for how to make Palworld more fun, and we’d be insane to ignore that.”
The community lead continues, saying that even though Palworld has reached wide audiences – more than 32 million players now, to be precise – the game is still very much a work in progress and has been since the beginning. “We’re obviously incredibly fortunate that Palworld resonated with millions of people from day one, but that doesn’t change the fact that Palworld has been a WIP this entire time,” as Bucky puts it.
“Maybe it’s just more of a Steam culture thing? Should we not have called Satisfactory, BG3, or Enshrouded early access simply because they were popular too? Even though I’m sure all three would say they became better games due to the feedback they received during early access,” says the dev, pointing to fellow Early Access successes like Baldur’s Gate 3 – a title that similarly racked up millions of players (and various awards, too).
“Millions of players jumping in during early access does not invalidate those efforts,” the dev concludes. “Games only get better when the players are involved.” He also begs, “Please don’t ignore all the successes” in Early Access – Palworld being just one.