A friend of ours, a patron and one of our TTRPG playtesters who some of you may know by Nelren on Discord has had some really shitty luck for a couple of years in a row now, and they recently got into an accident that almost took their life that they will need months to recover from. They're asking for just a little help to pay for food and rent. Please throw them some aid on GoFundMe if you can, or at least share the link with others so it reaches people who can help them out.
(Graphic Image warning, cuz the link includes a picture of Nel in the hospital, some bruises and blood and bandages)
I don't have a ton of reach on my own, but my hope is that some of you can share this more broadly than I can.
Comic this week: God Slayers - Page 254
Playing: Palworld
TTRPG: Didn't make a ton of progress this weekend, because, well, I played Palworld in between mountain biking and hanging with friendos, but I did make SOME progress. Chapter 8 (Combat) continues to be a chapter that requires some of the most work. Namely a little bit of a reorg for the Energy economy and for managing turn order. The freeform spotlight works less well for this system than for some others I think, largely BECAUSE of Energy and a more stringent management of resources between attacking and defending. So I'm fiddling around with some other ideas I've had to tidy it up a bit and to try and make it more manageable from the GM side as well.
Ramble:
I've seen a lot of discourse lately about the Palworld 1.0 launch, with opinions, as one might expect, ranging from "ERMAGERD BEST GAME EVER" to "ERMAGERD WORST GAME EVER." And I want to just kinda briefly give my thoughts. I'm, as one might expect, somewhere in the middle on the spectrum, but I'm leaning more towards the positive than the negative in regards to Palworld. I'm having fun playing it. More fun with it since 1.0 than I had when it launched into early access. And I think that's pretty neat.
Now, with that said, everything in this ramble is just my opinion. I'm not accusing any real companies of being downright evil or cavorting with demons. In fact, I'm not even talking about real companies. This is a fictional ramble and nothing I'm talking about is real. Also it's parody.
I do want to blab for a little bit about Nerdlendo, a fake company, and their popular franchise, Pookiemoon, the non-existent creature collecting game that doesn't exist. Pookiemoon is a global phenomenon on a little planet called Eroth. Eroth also doesn't exist. It's where my sona lives, why not.
We all clear on what we're talking about? Great.
Cuz I think Pookiemoon is a perfect example of what happens when one company is allowed to dominate any given product genre without competition for far too long. Pookiemoon is the largest game franchise... perhaps ever afaik. It became a cultural powerhouse in the early 90s (in Eroth years) and has fostered multiple generations of fans. But once Nerdlendo found themselves sitting on a mountain of wealth and power, they became scared of losing it, as many companies often do, and they developed a propensity for predatory litigation after summoning an army of lawdemons, and they crafted their fanbase into a cult that rallied and attacked anything that threatened Nerdlendo's glorious tyranny. This, for a time, basically scared away all their competition. Because who in their right mind would face down an army of rabid cultists and lawdemons just because they wanted to make a fun game? It's a bold ask when any company or individual could just make a different game, avoiding all that hassle. This lack of competition, of course, ends up looking great for Nerdlendo on paper, because their multigenerational cult was trained to buy anything with the Pookiemoon logo on it, no matter how high its price and no matter how little effort went into making it, and they do so with songs in their hearts because they've been trained to NEED those kinds of products and they have no other choice but to buy them from Nerdlendo.
But while it might be said that competition is good for the consumer and bad for the investor, I really think companies that suppress or attack their competition are just shooting themselves in the foot in the long term. Because what ends up happening is by scaring away all their competition, it becomes really easy for Nerdlendo to simply stagnate. And stagnate they certainly have. Without healthy competition there's no incentive to innovate, to improve, or to change course. Creative talent is expensive, because innovation takes time, and time is costly, but hey, who needs it? They can simply fire all their creative talent, or better yet, drive them away by making their jobs miserable, and save a few extra nonbucks (which is the global currency of Eroth, as everyone knows). All Nerdlendo REALLY needs to do is keep cranking out shiny clones of the same products they've already released at higher and higher prices to their cultist fans. They're blind to the flaws anyway, because they've been trained to be. Over time, as the business model shifts, Nerdlendo slowly hollows itself out, becoming a braindead factory for lifeless, grey-colored slop that gets wrapped in shiny paper. (Another company on Eroth called Bethamsdum followed the same trajectory, as a matter of fact.) It's slop they continue to sell for oodles of nonbucks. Tens of oodles. Hundreds of oodles. Oodles of oodles. Of nonbucks. Because there's no such thing as too many nonbucks. Nonbucks are worthless. Because once enough people have amassed oodles of oodles of nonbucks, they might as well all just claim to have infinite money. And at that point, who cares? Cuz they're nonbucks.
And it's frankly, tragic. It's tragic for those fans, tragic for the company, tragic even for my sona. Because you see my sona was once a huge fan of Nerdlendo, and they loved Pookiemoon, and they would love to see a new Pookiemoon game with some of that love and passion that went into the originals, to see a game with much more modern improvements and refinements or to see Nerdlendo try something that's exciting and different. And my sona was super sad when they realized that's just not the company that Nerdlendo is any more. Perhaps it isn't the company they ever were, once the veil is drawn back and the facade comes crashing down and it's all just hollow on the inside. It's impossible to know how long it's been like that. But my sona is no dummy, despite having a tardigrade for a brain. They would much rather quietly walk away from Nerdlendo and look for something else than continue to waste unending nonbucks on grey slop. In fact the last Pookiemoon game my sona played felt like it hadn't learned any lessons from the last twenty years of game development. It was technically a game, but it was a fake game. It was grey slop that lacked anything real. And then a little company called Dualpouch came out with a game called Buddyland.
Of course, instantly, the rabid cultists frothed and Nerdlendo deployed its army of evil lawdemons to sue the shit out of Dualpouch. Nerdlendo couldn't possibly fathom losing even one oodle of nonbucks to someone that wasn't Nerdlendo. It was a hollow insatiable emptiness machine and it would not be challenged. But when the lawdemons opened their greedy mouths, they showed that all their scary teeth were made of paper, and when all the scary cultist fans showed up to support Nerdlendo and tear down its enemies they all turned out to be... just kinda cringe. And now what I think we're observing develop over the past couple of years of Nerdlendo's impotence is the revitalization of a genre that we all thought Nerdlendo's iron grip had made untouchable. Now all over the place we start to see indie companies both small and medium start to dip their toe in the creature-collecting genre with some pretty innovative offerings. And frankly, I think that's exciting! Will I my sona play most of these games? Probably not if I'm honest. But what's exciting about it is that other people will, and the more variety people are exposed to, the more innovation that's allowed in the space, the more potential there is for people to feel inspired by that variety and come up with more, even newer and better ideas on their own. THAT is what art is all about.
The thing that Nerdlendo seems to fail to understand is that games are art, and art is so much more than just profit. When everything becomes about the profit, it loses its spirit. We love games because they are art. We love the passion and the love and the spirit when someone real cares enough to put a part of themselves into the art. When a company hollows itself out to become a factory for grey slop, we may not immediately recognize it for what it is or what it's doing, but we can all feel it. And we all begin to slowly drift away, and we look for something else, in many cases anything else, anything that has spirit in it.
So what does any of this have to do with Palworld? Nothing. Up there is all a fictional story and it's also opinion and parody that contains no real world references at all. And obviously nothing is so simple that it can be expressed merely in words. The real world is messy and complicated and has many perspectives and no one single person's train of thought can confidently account for all the minutia of any given topic. Least of all in a dumb blog written by some crazy idiot.
But the point is that I do think that Palworld, while I don't think it's the greatest game of all time, is many times better than any similar game I've played made by some other company in recent years. And I do think the ordeal that Pocketpair has gone through has shown the world that competition matters and that fighting on the side of competition isn't a lost cause. And I think that investors should pay attention, because I think they're really shooting themselves in the foot for the long term any time they encourage these anti-competition practices that only serve to stifle innovation and hollow out the companies they invest in. Maybe investors don't care, idk, cuz they can just hollow out a company and move on to the next one anyway, but gosh it'd be nice if they DID care and maybe DIDN'T do that shitty stuff all the time because who the fuck cares about piling up more worthless nonbucks? And I'm excited to see more developers dipping their toes into the creature collecting space of gaming and generating a potential whirlwind of innovation.
And hey, maybe Nerdlendo isn't a lost cause, maybe there's a chance they could still learn something from being faced with some real competition and maybe they'll reenter the creative space with some brilliant new offering that shakes the world of Eroth to its very core. But, eh, seriously doubt it ngl.
Hope I gave you a chuckle if nothing else, thanks for reading.