Traditional studio systems work but traditional publishing models don't.

I'd hardly call Palworld innovative, It's Satisfactory/Factorio meets Rust with legally distinct pokemon. The novelty is what carries it but it didn't exactly reinvent the genre by any stretch.

Yeah, the novelty is basically that it's Pokemon with the rose-tinted glasses off. But I'd argue that's not really what carries it and neither is gameplay that works surprisingly well for something they glued together from Pokemon, Breath of the Wild, and any survival action game.

What carries it is that Pocketpair have kept improving the game despite legal interference and without succumbing to the temptation of charging more money.

There's no pre-launch DLC. There's no out-of-early-access price hike. The 1.0 release had so much new stuff in it that it could've been sold as an expansion pack in the pre-DLC days and they just pushed it as a free update because they felt the game wasn't done yet. Even the crossover content is free.

This is a game where the developer actually seems to care about delivering a good product. And I think you can feel it in the quality of the game.

It's as if making a game that players enjoy and want to play while keeping the pricing honest and without bullshit battlepasses and dlc's worked better than making the uptenth slop made to milk the players with nothing but the shareholders in mind. Shocking, I know.

€30 vs €80 and I can play it hundreds of hours.
Is that so hard of an equation ?

You can play assassin's Creed for a hundred hours too. Another part of the equation is creativity and ingenuity in mechanics. Paying full price for the same game 4 times with different skins doesn't cut it

Innovative mechanics are generally where indies are shining though.

I’m not arguing that some AAA don’t have merits either in play time or other but from a euro per minute of pleasure overall they are not as good as indie games these last 10 or so years.

I think part of it is that game budgets are too massive.

That's innovation, combining existing ideas and concepts, building upon what the people before you have built.

Yep, and massive game budgets lead to needing lots of customers to offset the costs which leads to sanding off everything that stands out for "broad market appeal" which leads to "a game for everyone is a game for no one."

The lesson? If making a AAA game without creative risk and without an exploitative funding model is too much of a financial risk for your studio, don't make AAA games.

..... That's the point of what I just said

Yeah, it would still be a great game in a universe where Pokemon doesn't exist. The devs are very open about using established game mechanics, and those are established for a reason.

The closest game to Palworld is probably Ark, being another open-world creature collector, survival crafter combination. However, on top of all the significant aesthetic and QOL changes, Palworld still has a much deeper colony management and creature interaction and optimization angle to still make it quite unique mechanically.

Palworld looks like it was made out of cheap knock-off toy plastic and it still rules*

*like a despot, specifically