Dead by Daylight staff lead slams Palworld, calls out Pokémon creator for ‘missed opportunity’

Palworld, Pocketpair’s creature-collecting survival game, is more than just Pokémon with guns, but it has attracted a fair share of negative opinions from personalities in the games industry. Now, Dead by Daylight’s chief of staff, known as Nathan S. on LinkedIn, is the latest to join the club.

Besides highlighting its glaring performance and design issues, in a LinkedIn post, Nathan S. stressed that while Palworld has all the addictive elements needed to keep its playerbase alive, combined with the time and revenue to fix its flaws, it’s missing “warmth” that “no amount of money can fix.”

He also shared what he thinks is the “biggest takeaway from Palworld”: that Pokémon developer Game Freak missed an opportunity, and called out the company for “taking a devoted playerbase for granted for far too long.” He wrote: “Hopefully this serves as a wakeup call.”

Comparing Palworld to the Pokémon franchise and highlighting what the former lacks, Nathan S. explained: “At the risk of being saccharine, what makes Pokémon special is the bond you form with your adorable ball-dwellers. And this bond is a source of something approaching ludonarrative harmony—the strongest trainers are those who have the greatest connection with their Pokémon.” Well, Palworld certainly does lack the empathy that the Pokémon franchise taught us, and it isn’t something Pocketpair can fix with content updates.

Palworld might have been a smash hit across all platforms, especially Xbox Game Pass, but it did come with a huge list of flaws, the most prominent of which Nathan S. highlighted in his post. For the most part, I agree—as a Palworld player myself, I’m tired of the random crashes and unbearable lag. That said, while adding “warmth” might be a bit too much to expect, hopefully Pocketpair will fix Palworld’s other issues in its upcoming updates. 

Palworld’s irrefutable similarity to the Pokémon games didn’t go unnoticed either, as The Pokémon Company shared plans to investigate Pocketpair for infringement on intellectual property last week.