Recently, a small company came out of the woodworks with a game called Palworld. For those unaware, Palworld is an open-world survival game where players go around and capture “Pals,” in-game animals that will follow orders from the player. If this sounds familiar, it’s because the developers copied the entire idea of Pokemon and added a lot to it.

The game blew up seemingly overnight, with a peak of 2,101,393 concurrent players. There was extreme hype and everyone was enjoying it. Many were wondering how the game blew up seemingly overnight. The reason? It was essentially Pokemon with guns, bringing the internal 12-year-old out of many adults who were looking for outside entertainment for when they’re off work.

On January 28th, the game reached a peak of 2,101,867 players (according to SteamDB), then sharply declined after, averaging ~100,000 player peak since. This begs the question; what happened? It’s actually pretty simple; the game had around 40-50 hours of content in it. By that playtime, many players would have captured all the pals they wanted, built a superbase and went through the entire game story, and there was simply nothing left to do.

For a game that had little to no marketing, by a brand new studio that hadn’t released any games, Palworld certainly blew up overnight. For a game not out of Early Access (essentially a beta version that’s unfinished), it had monumental success, but a lot of controversies too, from people asking Nintendo, the owner of the Pokemon franchise, their thoughts on the knockoff version of their brand.