The Ringer-Verse - Why Is Everyone Playing (or Complaining About) ‘Palworld’? | Button Mash

Episode Date: January 26, 2024

Join Ben, Matt James, and Justin Charity as they delve into the biggest gaming phenomenon of the year: ‘Palworld.’ They ask and answer 10 questions raised by the game’s success, including how ��Palworld’ became so popular (06:05), whether it’s more than just “‘Pokémon’ with guns,” the controversies it has caused, whether ‘Palworld’ will be a mainstay or a flash in the pan (62:33), and more. Host: Ben Lindbergh Guests: Matt James and Justin Charity Producer: Eduardo Ocampo Additional Production: Arjuna Ramgopal Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Did Don Draper really buy the world of Coke? Did Tony Soprano really die? Or just order more onion rings? Were those guys really in hell the whole time, or was that just the audience? The finales of our favorite shows can make us argue, make us cry, and make us crazy. From Spotify and The Ringer, I'm Andy Greenwald, and this is Stick the Landing, a new podcast where we'll be telling the story of modern TV backwards, one fade out at a time. Each episode, a guest and I will choose a celebrated series from history,

from the 70s to the streaming era and beyond and do a deep dive on its very last episode. Was it all a dream? Did it turn into a nightmare? And most importantly, what can we learn about tomorrow's new shows from the way yesterday's ended? TV is a journey.

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you plan on doing summer. Visit weathertech.com today. into the ringerverse, your nexus podcast feed for all things fandom. I am Ben Lindberg, your host and a senior editor for the ringer, and today I'm joined by a couple of pals, pals who can help me build a base of knowledge, who can help me mine for information, who can help me fight for the truth. They're here, not because I trap them in a pod sphere, but because they join me of their own free will. Ringer senior staff writer Justin Charity, welcome back to.

button mash. You can't say that. You have to say a slightly different sound so that we don't get sued here. Speak a fee. There you go. And Ringer Deputy Art Lead, Matt James, happy to have you. Long time, no talk. Hey, Ben. Happy to be back. As we all expected to be recording a podcast about Powell World today. Hold on to your loincloths, listeners, because this is a button mash emergency. There have already been a bunch of great games released this year, Persia the Lost Crown, The Last of Us Part 2 remastered, came out last week. Matt and I covered that on Monday. Tekken 8, and Like a Dragon, Infinite Wealth are out today and getting great reviews. But all of those games, along with every other game on Earth, not named Fortnite,

have been bodied by a brand new early access title from an indie developer, the inescapable, omnipresent, POW World. We are one week into the Powell World era. I can't even remember the days before Power World. Do you remember what it was like? How we lived? We were playing. Arcade games, Alien Invaders.

Yeah. I think we skipped straight from Pac-Man to Power World. That's basically all I can remember. Gaming may never be the same. We've been playing Power World. You've probably been playing Power World. And if you haven't been playing Power World, there's a decent chance that you've been hearing about Power World

and wondering why everyone else is playing it. we are here to help you answer that question and many more questions. Is the Powell World Apocalypse upon us? Is Powell World the prince that was promised? Do we have to divide the whole history of gaming into pre-Pow World and post-Pow World? We have waded into the discourse. We've read the threads. We've taken a crash course on Power World so that you don't have to, or so that if you already have, we can all collectively compare notes and figure out what the heck is happening here. Guys, a few weeks ago, we discussed our most anticipated video games of 2024. And as I recall, Power World wasn't one of them. Fingers on the pulse over here with us.

We totally saw this coming. We acknowledged on that episode that in gaming, there are always surprises in store, but I don't think we could have conceived of something blowing up to this extent so soon. If you had told us 10 days ago, we would be doing a podcast about Power World today. I think we would have said, wait, what's Powell World? Yet, here we are. Do you guys remember how you heard about Power World if you can cast your mind back? Justin, where were you when you got Powell Pilled?

To me, wasn't it just Slack? I feel like it was in Slack. Somebody said something in Slack. And it included the phrase that everyone utters about Powell World, which is Pokemon with guns. And I immediately went to Steam. And I was like, I will expect. Remember to expense this, I believe, is what I muttered to myself.

Keep your receipts, people. Matt, what's your Powell World Origin story? Actually, I saw it as coming soon on GamePass, and I was like, oh, this looks interesting in a way that it's not something for me at all, and I don't think I'll play it, even though it's free for me. Yeah, little did you know. You would be putting tons of time into it. I don't remember the first tweet or story I saw, but I know I was alerted to the almost moral panic about Powell World well before I played Powell World or even watch people play it.

It took some time for me to separate that initial widespread perception of Powell World from the reality, which is related, but maybe a bit misleading. We'll get to that. So Matt, you almost had a more pure introduction to Power World than I did or than Justin did. You were just like, oh, look at this game. maybe I'll check this out or maybe I won't, whereas we were kind of clued into the fact that this is a thing we have to know about this now. It's a different way to discover it.

Yeah, definitely. I mean, it looked like a Fortnite knockoff with we have Pokemon at home mixed into it. So I was going to pass on that real quick until everyone in the world started talking about this game. Well, that's not the least accurate description of all the possible descriptions of Powell World. But however you came to the game, it's Powerworld's worlds. We're just playing in it. So how and why did Power World become the colossus of the Steam charts? We intend to investigate, which is exactly what the Pokemon Company statement said.

Vin, you're on one. I mean, look, it's the unanticipated Powerworld energy. I just did not know that we would be doing this. Here we are. I'm surprised. I'm excited. We have a genuine gaming phenomenon on our hands. And because this has exploded so suddenly, we're going to try a slightly different format today. I'm going to throw out 10 questions, 10 prompts about Powerworld. And we will discuss them so that no matter what your level of Powell World awareness is, if you are living under a stone that no one has harvested for raw materials to upgrade their base yet, then we will feel. fill you in on what you need to know about Powell World, or at least what you must know, whether you need to know or not is debatable. But whatever your level of engagement and awareness or interest is, you can follow along and hopefully be both enlightened and

entertained. So let's start with a deceptively simple question, which is, so wait, what is power world? Now, Matt, you just gave us your initial impression based on seeing it before you played it before anyone was talking about it. That's one way you could define it. Do you want to start here? We can all collaborate on the answers to these questions. We will answer them communally. But how would you define Powell World for someone who has not been exposed to it yet? Yeah. So by genre, I would say it's an open world survival, action adventure, monster taming game. By what is it. Yeah, the multi-hyphen it. A lot of hyphens. But what I would also describe it as is

stolen things from Pokemon, Zelda Breath of the Wild, Fortnite, and, you know, little other games influences are sprinkled in throughout. It kind of takes a lot

from a lot of other games and brings it all into one game. Yes. Okay. When you put it like that, I've decided for the rest of this episode, I'm playing the defense attorney for the power world developers. And of all the charges

is launched, I think I can at least beat the charge of ripping off Breath of the Wild. I think that's overreach. Your Honor, I think I can Oh, no. I can test that. That one sound that you hear when you enter a new area, you know what I'm talking about. If I didn't

know better, I would say that was literally lifted from Breath of the Wild. They just like recorded it on their phone. Well, you think Brother of the Wild invented piano? Okay. I mean, you can talk about it. Wow, we should have done a Phoenix right. Just objection. Yeah, we could have prosecution, defense.

Yes, a whole copyright infringement case here. We'll get to all of that. The gliders. Adam Neely testify about the copyright. Okay, let's go. Yeah, we'll keep a moving. It's like the movie, the player, right? Where they're pitching a movie and it's this meets that, meets that, meets that, right?

It's a mashup of popular games and popular genres. So it's, it's Pokemon meets Minecraft, meets Breath of the Wilds. with some Fortnite and Valheim and Eldon's Eldon ring sprinkled in there. Just the basic biographical details here. It's created and published by a Japanese indie developer called PocketPair. It is 2999 on Steam and it's free on Game Pass, which is very relevant to what we will be talking about here. And the hook, or one of the hooks, is the Pokemon inspired. That would be the charitable way to put it, PALS, more than 100 collectible.

catchable pals, enslavedable pals, that can work for, fight for, carry you, whatever you want to put them to work doing, right?

And you can play this solo. You can play it offline. You can play it online, four-player co-op. You can set up a dedicated server with 32 people per server. And even though this kind of came out of nowhere

for most people who have heard of pal world in the past week, it is not a pure hi-fi rush-style surprise drop, right? It's not something that no one knew existed or was coming. This game was announced in June 2021. It's still in early access, but it caused something of a stir, even when it was announced, just based on the Pokemon with Guns kind of hook.

Either I missed that at the time or I had forgotten about it by the time it came out. But it was not nearly as big a thing, just to put it into perspective. The initial announcement trailer from two and a half years ago still has fewer than 400,000 views, which is, oh, about a fifth of the number of people playing Power World at this instant on Steam alone. So there was plenty of publicity along the way, but it was a far lower level of virality. The New York Times was not paying attention to Power World until this week, and frankly, neither were we. So that's what Powell World is, which takes us to our second question. What is Powell World not?

as in what are some of the major misconceptions about the game? Justin, do you want to start that off? I'll fit, because I actually think that as much of a meme and as much of a hook the Pokemon with Guns thing is, I think if someone put up the $30 for Power World with that being the thing that got them into it, that feels like a head fake, right? Because then you, it's like you boot it up. and like of all the things that you and Matt were describing it as sort of ripping off, I think the one that's the most important is Pokemon meets Minecraft, right?

Because it's like, if you look at a game like Minecraft, that to me is the most relevant, like, you might like power world thing, right? Because to me, I mean, that's almost sort of my ambivalence about the game is kind of about that, right? is like, if it felt more immediately like and more simplistically like Pokemon with guns, I think I would be totally all in on it. The fact that it instead feels like checklist, fetch quests, collect 40 pieces of wood

to build a wooden chest. Like, it actually reminds me in a lot of ways of the stuff I didn't like about Pokemon Arsius, which is why I also find it's kind of curious that people are sort of doing the kind of shot. in Freud about this is a better Pokemon game than the recent Pokemon games. It's like, no, it kind of reminds me of what annoyed me about Pokemon RCS really. But it's not, it is a shooter.

And like, you sort of, the more time you dump into it, the more you sort of like get the, the, the fully realized meme of power world. But it's not, it's not really Pokemon with guns and just that. Yeah. And also, it takes 20 plus hours to. to unlock guns for your Pokemon. Yes. Yeah, the trailer is not false advertising, but it's sort of delayed advertising, right?

It's playtime bloat. It's like playtime bloat is what the game feels like in a lot of ways to me. Many people have discovered, maybe to their dismayed, that they have sunk hours into this thing and when do I get the guns, right? I see the Pokemon, I see the pals. Not so much the guns, right?

There's plenty of other stuff to do, but no, I would not describe it as a shooter if that is your first introduction to it. It is also not proven to be a product of generative artificial intelligence. We will discuss later on in a subsequent question why it has been suspected of using generative AI. Thus far, not fully substantiated, circumstantial, seemingly baseless or at least unproven, right? It is not purely an asset flip either. So an asset flip, that's a term for,

basically the cheapest kind of knockoff cash in shovelware, right? You just, you purchase pre-made assets and you make a generic game that looks like something else just off the shelf, right? And you are just really trying to cash in without any creativity or originality or even design on your part necessarily. That's not quite what is happening here, as we have hinted at. Obviously, there are inspirations that border on plagiarism, and we will talk about that. The best kind of plagiarism is bordering on plagiarism, I'm saying. Possibly technically not plagiarism, but it obviously is an homage. Maybe we could put it that way. That's also a charitable way to put it.

It's based on several other things and based quite closely on several other things. But there is some degree of personalized design and originality going on. here we could disagree about the degree and many people have. And then the final thing I'll say that Power World is not. This is a direct quote from the Power World Steam page FAQ. It is not a scam. Your Honor. It is not a scam. They said it in the FAQ. Yeah. Yeah. That's that's very reassuring when that is one of the most frequently asked questions about something. Is it a scam? You know, It's like my FAQ answer is raising a lot of questions. I mean, that's what I ask about any game that I would plan to play or purchase.

Is it a scam? First, let's establish that. Is it a scam? Can you assure me that it's not a scam? And pocket pair assures us that it is not. So, number three, just how popular is Powell World? Why are we doing an emergency podcast about Powerworld? Because, and I'll drop some stats.

on you here. It sold more than 8 million copies in its first six days, which does not count the people who have played Powell World on Game Pass. That is an astronomical extraordinary number. Its peak player count of more than 2 million on Steam has more than doubled or roughly doubled the peaks of name every other gigantic game from the past year or two. Cyberpunk, Eldon Ring, Baldersgate, Hogwarts Legacy. Only PubG. has had a higher all-time peak. Of course, Fortnite is higher, too. Fortnite has around 3 million concurrent players these days, but it's not on Steam.

But nothing else other than PubG and Fortnite in recent years that we've tracked, at least can compare to the number of people playing Powell World simultaneously. Also peaked at more than 400,000 people watching Pal World on Twitch. Can you guys remember of all the sensations of all the phenomena? does anything in your mind compare to the uproar, the furor surrounding Powell World? I'm just surprised by the Elder Ring's like because I just remember Peak Eldon Ring really felt like everyone on Earth

was playing and streaming that game. So the idea of Power World kind of just, we're not talking from soft, we're talking about this random, is it a scam in the FACU? Like, topping that and Hogwarts Legacy. considering how just huge Hogwarts legacy. It's just the fact that this game, yeah, exceeding that is,

it feels incomparable in a lot of ways. Yeah, it feels like a wild anomaly. Like you're talking about all these games that have had huge budgets, big production teams. And this came seemingly out of nowhere for a lot of people and is surpassing all of the biggest releases. it's, there's nothing like it. It's incredible to watch.

Yeah. So that obviously raises the next question. Number four, why is Powell World so popular? How do we explain this phenomenon? Now, our next question is going to be about the game itself and whether it's good, which is where you would usually start when you're answering the question of why a game is popular. That obviously plays a part here, but it is not the sole answer and it may not even be the the primary answer. So we're going to wrestle with this one for a while because I think there are a number of competing and complementary explanations.

Matt, you want to lead us off? What do you make of this sensation? Why is Powell World breaking through more so than any other game just about ever has? I think, I mean, I would speculate that the reason it's so successful is because it's an amalgamation of so many successful games. If you have a history with any of those games, with Minecraft, with Zelda, with Pokemon, with, you know, Valheim, with, like, there are so many games that are, that this, you know, has heavily taken things from. Those games all have huge player bases. So it popped, I guess it pops up on the radar of all of these people.

When once you're aware of it, you have a reference point from a game you like that you've played that it could be similar to. So that's good at getting you in the door, obviously. But again, this isn't going to be a success if once you're in that door, everything sucks. So ultimately, I think the design of it draws people in across many genres. And then once you're in there, the gameplay loop is pretty good. Now, it's not perfect, obviously, and it is early access and there are parts of it that do feel either unfinished or cheap or buggy but there is something

that it is doing that it is doing pretty well i came into it not really wanting to play this at all and i'm what i'm i must be over 20 maybe close to 30 hours into it now and i don't think i'm going to be stopping anytime soon. And I think that for me, the things that it has taken from other games is not the appeal to me. I'm not enjoying it because it feels like Zelda here or because it feels like Pokemon here.

I think for me, the one dynamic of it that feels really rewarding is that when you catch these pals, they each have, like they, when you catch your pals, they can help you sort of build and automate your base in intriguing ways.

And you can catch a new pal that will change the way you operate your base. So there is combat and there is exploration and there is base building. And the pals kind of factor into all of those,

into traversal, into combat, and into base building and automation. So if you catch a pal and you're like, I'm never going to fight with this, but man, this thing really is great in my base.

It is helping me get this one rare material that I was struggling to get. Or similarly, you know, oh, man, this thing can't work at all. This is a terrible worker, but I put this in the field and it can do some damage, you know. So I think the gameplay loop ultimately is good, and the marketing is good too. Yeah, I don't want to diminish the gameplay. And I want to focus on that because I think it would be giving. Powell World's short shrifter would be not giving it appropriate credit to suggest that it's all hype and it's all memes and it's all marketing because there is some substance there.

But also there is a lot of meme and hype and marketing. I mean, that is, I think what you're saying about the fact that it casts such a wide net with its influences, that it's borrowing, if we want to put it that way, taking a cue from so many different popular properties, that there's something for everyone. there, at least in theory, right? Or, you know, if I'm reeling off this list of Minecraft meets Breath of the Wild meets, you know, on and on and on, something I'm saying there is probably going to appeal to you. Some of those things might turn you off. You might say, I'm not into Fortnite. I'm not into Valheim. I don't like survival games. But I like Pokemon. I like

Breath of the Wild. All right. If there's a little bit of DNA in there, then that's a reason for me to check this out. It's piggybacking on the popularity of so many other series that I think that helps it out a lot initially with that first push. Now, granted, you then have to knit together all of those influences into some kind of coherent experience. And that's where I think it's actually somewhat impressive. But that is just a huge help. Justin, do you think there's anything else that's playing apart just from a sort of discoverability

perspective even before you get into the game? Yeah. You know what? I'm going to bring up something that's going to seem unrelated because today I was. getting up a piece about like John Stewart returning to the Daily Show, right? And that got me thinking about, you know, that kind of shift to when, you know, how all the late night comedy shows shifted to this expectation that they kind of needed to adapt to the internet.

And they needed to adapt to that kind of, oh, 30 to 90 second breakout clip of like something on the show that goes viral the next day, right? and a version of that happened in games, right? It's like the story of, where it's a story in gaming since like five nights at Freddy's, right? Where that's a game that both has a great underlying, like the original Five Nights at Freddy's, right?

Like has a great underlying core gameplay loop, right? But also it's the structure of the game and sort of the emergence of, you know, streams of that game made it really good, for content creators, right? So as much as you can say that the underlying Five Nights at Freddy's is like a good game to play, it's like a good horror game,

so Ben, you're never going to play it. Right? There is undeniably like a huge part of the story of Five Nights at Freddy's becoming this like massive multimedia franchise that it became, right? Was the fact that it made for good content. And yeah, I do think it's not even giving the game short shrift, right, in the case

of Powell World to say, it's good content. You know what I mean? It's just really, like, it's just undeniably, like that pitch is strong. Yeah, man, it's good. Like, I don't know. For something that that's this much of an upstart

and that is kind of rough around the edges, like it does actually matter quite a bit that people can sort of glom onto or seize onto this game with the sense of like, oh yeah, this thing is like causing a conversation. This thing makes for like a good YouTube short

where it's just sort of you look out of context, right? You just look at a clip of somebody playing something that looks like Pokemon RCS but also looks like Fortnite and something that looks like a Pokemon but also a character with a rifle and Nintendo would never make this what is going on. You know what I mean? Like that matters. That matter.

Right. That's to the game's credit, I think. Yeah, that transgressive. satirical aspect. Pokemon with guns, that is a powerful image, right? It's not even so much that that makes you think of

playing the game. It's just, that's funny, right? That's funny. It's inherently funny. It's inherently funny. That combo of cute critters plus violence, subverting expectations,

it reminds me, you know, going back to Conquer's Bad Fur Day, right? Or Charles Holmes' favorite TV show, Ted, or Matt, we were talking about Hollow Night It's drawn together. It's drawn together. If anyone remembers, drawn together, one of my favorite underrated animated comments. Yeah. Hollow Night is obviously a great game, but also that kind of cutesy look in a genre where you don't expect to see that, that I think draws you in before you even play it.

And you find out that it's such a great game. And the controversy, I think all press is good press applies here, right? That's how I found out about Pal World. That's what made me want to look at. into it and ultimately play it and podcast about it. There's a controversy. It's divisive. People are pissed, right? People are up in arms against it. People are up in arms defending it. And when something like that is going on, you know, look, we're simple, primitive creatures. We're not very advanced as a species. We want to rubberneck. If our peers are paying attention to something, then we want to say, hey, what's going on over there? We want to check that thing out. Probably helps that it's January. Now, not that it's dead from a gaming perspective.

I listed some of the great games that have come out already, but it's traditionally a little less packed from a media perspective, right? And I don't think we can discount the fact that it's inexpensive, right? That is crucial. Like, that barrier to entry is so much lower at 29. Or on the ground, if you've got Game Pass and you can try it for free, if this were a premium price game, and granted it's early access,

that would be sort of unusual, but given the production quality here and the technical state of the game and the glitchiness and the buggyness and the jankiness, if you were looking at that and this is a $50, $60 game, that's a very different equation than, hey, I'll try this thing out,

possibly for free or at most for $30. Yeah, I think that expectations thing is interesting because there's actually stuff about Power World and the grindiness of it, like the survival aspects of it, where as much as people want to dunk on Nintendo in this moment, I would insist that there's stuff in Power World that if Nintendo did it, people would hate it. I think if the next Pokemon game felt as grindy

as the early game for this feels, people would be like, Nintendo is trash, give me my money back. Now, part of that would be because Nintendo would try to sell it to you for $70 instead of $30. But I think, yeah, I just want to put that out there. Even though I'm the defense attorney, I feel like I'm lost to my role in the If it were Nintendo, it might run better, but if it were Pokemon, it probably wouldn't.

So there might not be much of a difference there. Well, they would also be handholding you through all of the systems at the start rather than what Powell does, which is just I wouldn't mind. Give you a checklist of things to do rather than some sort of tutorial. It's right. Here you go. Just figure it out. Yeah, maybe that's a generous reading. But yeah, I think that is a big, it's just that, like, why were we all intrigued by the boys initially? Now, it turns out the boys is a great show on its own merits and in its own right, right? But initially it was, ooh, look at this. It's a superhero story. But it's not like the Marvel stuff. We're actually exploring all the implications of having superpowers and we're getting gross and we're going to be really raunchy. and you'll tune in just to see that. Now they have to hook you at that point to keep you around. But that alone kind of gets you in the door. There's also an appeal of everyone kind of gathering around this whole like threat of litigious.

Yeah, it's like it's sort of like the smallest guy in the neighborhood just went up to the biggest guy in the neighborhood and broad daylight decked him in the face. And everyone's just standing around going, oh, and we're just like waiting to see what happened. Like, nobody messes with Nintendo. Everyone knows Nintendo has lawyers on lawyers, on lawyers. And this game is really challenging those lawyers. So I think it's sort of like waiting, just you're just waiting to see what happens. Like, what if this game has to, has to change?

Because Nintendo's lawyers have said, you can't do this and this and that and like, are they paying fines? Do they have to change the content in the game? Like this unprecedented successful game? Like, it could get wild or, I think, more likely scenario, is that Nintendo just kind of sits on its hands because I feel like they would have, they would have hit back by now, probably, right? Wait, but can I say, like, I think that's a really good point, right?

This sort of school yard fight dynamic. But I think it matters too specifically that it's Nintendo, right? Like I think about all the videos I've watched about competitive melee, right? And sort of the reaction of Nintendo over the years to the emergence of like Super Smash Brothers melee as a competitive scene. And that impulse from Nintendo to sort of smack it down and be like, smash is not supposed to be for, you know, adult sweats who want to turn this into an e-sports. smash is supposed to be for the children, right? And it's like a lot of Nintendo, I don't know, I feel like a lot of Nintendo design

compared to games published on the other consoles, right? Really do, it always seems to be that Nintendo is emphasizing that it has a very specific outlook on gaming. Gaming is for the children. It's why there's the blue shell in Mario Kart. It's why if you're losing, you get better items. If you're winning, you get worse items. right? It's because even competitive games under Nintendo, they're still supposed to be more like

party games, right? Now, Pokemon is a single player experience generally, but I think what Powerworld is kind of doing is somebody finally walked up to Nintendo and said, or it's like people have been frustrated, I think, for years in different vectors, right, with Nintendo's kind of in different franchises, instead of growing up with a particular generation of gamers, it's always kind of resetting and being like, we are making games for the children, stop trying to make competitive melee happen, stop, like, stop trying to insist that we need to grow up. We are the kids company, of all the brands, we are the company that is for the kids. And Power World represents, right, this kind of generational threat of people saying,

no, if you're not going to let Pokemon grow up, we're going to give them guns, we're going to give them guns, we're going to give Ash a gun and we're going to force you to make these characters we're going to basically, you know, we're going to sample Pokemon and we're going to

make Pokemon grow up if Nintendo won't do it. I feel like that's the actual underlying kind of generational warfare happening, right? Yeah, and I think there's some value in having Nintendo be the buttoned up straight lay family-friendly approach and sticking with that lane, which has worked for them so well for decades,

because it then opens up the potential for someone to come along and say, what if we do this, actually? What if we make a Conquer's Bad for a day? What if we give the Pokemon guns, right? Nintendo could give the Pokemon guns, too, if they wanted to. But in a way, it's much more amusing to have someone else come along and do that, right? Because now it's, oh, look at this. Are they going to get away with this, right? That makes it much more entertaining. And it's really interesting that it has turned people into teams and rooting interests. There are people who have rallied around Pokemon IP, surprisingly, right? And have said, hey, you can't do this to our beloved franchise. You're ripping us off. And then there are other people who are, you know, it's almost like a Robin Hood sort of thing,

steal from the rich, steal from the company that is constantly slapping us with cease and desist. So I think, there is an interesting kind of waiting for the other shoe to drop aspect to that. And I want to return to that in a second, but I do want to get your thoughts on the game itself. Justin, Matt, you started. You praised the game. And I should say, it is a pretty good game. I mean, that's our fifth question. Is Power World a good game? The fact that it took us until question five to get to that tells you just how much there is sort of surrounding this game that is not in the game itself. But for the most part, when people are actually playing Power World as opposed to raging about it online, people tend to like it, right? It has very positive reviews on Steam. Now, some people there, again, I went and looked at some of the reviews and they're saying, don't get sued, right? So maybe it's people just kind of rooting for Power World to pull this off, this underdog story. But I get the sense that people are enjoying it. The provisional critic reviews, the reviews in progress, fairly complimentary. What have you enjoyed about your time with the game?

I think it's my review would be, my logline would be, quote, good dot, dot, dot. Like that's my level of, like, I don't know. When I first started it, I was like, oh, this is placid. This is, this is chill. I definitely could, initially I could see myself sinking a ton of time into it. And then I kept feeling myself snap out of it a bit when I'd get a checklist item like, collect 10 of the same pal. I'm like, what?

I'm not doing that. That's insane. 10 of the same? That's not, no, I'm not doing that. I refuse. And that's kind of what I mean when I say that Pokemon, I mean, think about it, Pokemon as a franchise, is grindy. And pal is grindy, but to me, the grinds are different.

They're just different kinds of grind. And the moment I saw that checklist item of, like, collect 10 of the same thing, I was just like, oh, no, I started to find myself snapping out of it a bit because it does, like I see the seams of this being the kind of game that has like, like I said before, like kind of it feels very playtime bloat and it feels kind of not even really ashamed of that aspect of itself, right? It feels like a hustle

a little bit. So I'm a little less hot on it than I was maybe for the first couple of hours of playing it and just running around and collecting pieces of wood off of the ground to build a box, to build a bed, to build a... Yes. You know, yeah, good dot, dot, dot.

That's where I'm at, I think. Yeah, I don't think the quality of the game alone explains the phenomenon here, which is not to say that there's not a good game buried under here, or at least what many people would consider a good game. It couldn't be further from the type of game I typically play. I have talked about my feelings about

crafting. They are not fond feelings, right? I understand the appeal of progression and power growth and getting more powerful and building a base. We talked about that with Prince of Persia, Matt, earlier this week, but Prince of Persia, for me, is fun from the start. It's not that there's a degree of busy work and tree punching to get to the part where it starts to be fun. Now, maybe the fact that there's boring, busy work that you're doing chores initially makes it even more intoxicating when you can stop punching trees. Now I can use an axe on the trees. Now my pals will chop the trees and get the wood for me, right? So I get it. Because of my lack of experience with survival games, I feel almost unqualified to assess how real fans of the genre

will feel about Power World. But clearly they are embracing it. And I get it. Even though it's not really for me and long term, I don't know that it will be for me. I understand that it's shaking up and reconfiguring to established but somewhat stale and repetitive genres. It's breathing a little life into these things with this mashup, right? So I get it. There's a ton to do also. If you have the patience, I think that's what surprised me most about this game, is that there are tons of systems, right?

Systems on systems, places you can go. It's an enormous map. You can ride the pals. You can fly on the pals. I was honestly really sort of surprised by just how much is in this game, given how I came to it and my initial maybe misperception that, oh, this is just an attempt to make a quick buck. Yeah.

And I think what you touched on about, you know, sort of the grind. You both have mentioned the grind a lot. And Ben, you were mentioning, oh, well, you know, it sucks to go punch a tree, but then you get an axe and that's easier to find it. And then you can automate. So I think for me, it's where that automation comes in. It's sort of like if you have a reference point for Minecraft, right? Like you never super got, you probably didn't get to a point where like you had some sort of base of creatures who are automating all of this stuff that just was so grindy for you.

Like I don't have to go chop down trees anymore. I don't have to go collect stone anymore because I have like a logging thing and I have, you know, a pal who's particularly good at logging. And once they're done logging, they immediately deposit all of that in my my box. And anything in my box, I can automatically build with those materials anywhere within my base. I don't have to have it on my person. So it really, it shows you all of these grindy things and sets you up for, here's a grindy game. Here it is. You know it.

You love it. And then it makes all of those systems progressively easier and easier for you, which is very satisfying, especially if you have the reference point of Minecraft, of just like digging through stone for hours on end in Minecraft, you know? Yeah. For adults with Crohn's disease or ulcerative colitis symptoms, every choice matters.

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So underdog indie developer strikes gold. Good news. Real rooting interests. Something for the industry to celebrate, right? Wrong. This is a crisis. That leads us to question number six. Why has there been such a big backlash to Powell World?

We've obviously touched on some aspects of this. I think maybe the most fascinating to me is the AI paranoia. Because we've all worked ourselves into a level of vigilance where we're scared of the AI boogeyman. It's coming for all of us, right? It's coming for our jobs. It's coming for our entertainment. We're possibly seeing it in places where it doesn't exist. I will, okay, I would like to, I'm glad you started with this. Because I actually, I find this to be like the weakest aspect of the backlash to power world. And I think it's, it's almost like comically evident when you read articles that focus on it. Because it's sort of treated as like self-evidently scandalous and bad.

Even though one, it's not even clear what we're talking about exactly. We're talking about was generative AI used to make the game. But also, it's changed as self-evident. Like, it's true as obvious is why that would be bad if it were the case, right? Like, I think people point to the Steam guidelines for sort of incorporating AI and games, right? And I think there's, Steam, I think the word they use maybe embrace is embrace in some of the language. to talk about AI is I think Steam embraces the use of AI in games. They just require disclosures from publishers, right?

And I think maybe that would be an issue, right? Is if it's not sufficiently disclosed the degree or the elements that PowerWorld uses AI. But I don't know, man, it's software. Like I think software development of all the industries right now, like software development, right, like writing code is like a huge use case for AI at its current sort of capacities, right? And I don't think that, yeah, I don't think you're going to unring that bell or unsummon that genie. So I don't even necessarily understand what the scandal is in this context. I think there's just a lot of concern about, A, putting people out of work,

be a lack of originality if this were just purely an AI design. And this became the biggest game in the world with one designer on staff. What does that mean for the industry as a whole? There's already great concern about just the rampant layoffs, which have only accelerated this year. So you've got 5,000 plus people out of work this month at Riot, Unity, Microsoft, more than half of the already high 2023 total. And so I think, people are already sort of scared about what does this mean for the industry, not that there aren't some potential beneficial applications for AI in at least some circumstances, right? But whether it's AI or whether it's plain old-fashioned plagiarism, as other people have

alleged, either way, there's a lack of human ingenuity, originality, which I think leads to some resentment of the success, right, especially given what's going on elsewhere in the industry, given how many other great deserving games just slip through the cracks, right? Inevitably, there's going to be just some jealousy or some justified annoyance about that. And I understand why people raise the specter of AI here because the history of PocketPair and the CEO of PocketPair doesn't inspire confidence when it comes to steering clear of AI use, right? This company has published a previous AI-based game called AI Art Imposter, where Generative AI is, kind of a core mechanic. The CEO has speculated online about using AI to evade copyright infringement.

He has tweeted about fake Pokemon essentially created with AI, right? So there's sort of a tweet trail there that is kind of incriminating, even though there is nothing that actually says that they used AI in this game. There's no hard evidence that they did. In fact, you could even say that the fact that they've been so open about their AI use in the past makes it less likely that they're secretly using it here, that they would be more likely to just acknowledge it openly, given their history, right? But I understand why people leapt to that conclusion, but it is a leap. I think that also the, I think the AI controversy here is mostly centered around character design rather than around game design, right? Just putting a pal next to a

a Pokemon and saying, damn, look at that. Right? Like, you like, like, I think that's at the heart of it, right? Because we've had in recent years, you know,

we create entire genres and just tack the word like onto the end of them, right? Like, souls like, right? Like nobody, there wasn't any controversy when Liza P came out of like, is there going to be,

are they going to sue? Is from software going to sue? Like, this Liza P, it's basically a Souls game from a totally different development. Like, that didn't happen because the character design in the world were clearly a completely different thing. Obviously, inspired by From Software Games heavily, but there was no outcry of the masses around that. Whereas just, like, the Powell world, I think it's just, hey, man, that character is a cheap.

If I was the guy who designed like Hound Doom or something, I'd be like, man, they stole my shit. I think that's fair. That's the person who has the fairest case, I think. Yeah. There are some threads where people have done the side-by-side images, right, suspiciously similar designs. Also, people who have looked under the hood and have looked at the mesh models and the wireframes. And at least when they're the same scale, they're suspiciously overlapping, right? That's the closest thing to a smoking gun that has served.

thus far. So I think it's that. I think it's also, again, as you mentioned earlier, Justin, just the frustration with recent Pokemon games, the poor performance, the lack of innovation, just the general attitude towards Nintendo being unfan friendly in every other way, except for making great games. It's interesting because when some people have stepped up and said, hey, you can't just copy Pokemon like this. Other people will then be like, well, why are you white knighting for Nintendo, right? They don't need your help. They're not going to come to your aid when there's a fan game that they hear about.

They get wind of, right? They're going to slap that thing down instantly. So that's kind of an interesting, you know, who are you rooting for here? Which side are you taking in this corporate battle of the behemoth versus the indie developer that may be in the wrong in some ways? But also, the massive video game company might not be so sympathetic either. That's crazy. This is the Iraq war for Zumers. Jeez.

But do you remember like Digimon happened? Like way back when Pokemon came out? Digimon is fired. And Digimon drop. Still happening, by the way. Still happening. And you know what? There's not nearly a public outcry like this.

People were like, oh, Digimon, that's kind of, well, clearly you're just copying Pokemon. But they weren't copying, copy. They weren't like Xeroxing. They weren't Xeroxing Pokemon character designs, right? They were making their own designs. There's definitely a different world, a different aesthetic. Exactly. And, you know, I think we should remain vigilant when it comes to AI use or undisclosed AI use.

But maybe we're given AI too much credit, right? When we all just assumed instantly or a lot of people left to the conclusion that, oh, this is popular because AI designed it and AI is super powerful and can make this massively popular game, maybe we're not at that point yet. Maybe we are overrating at least the short-term threat or giving that technology too much credit, right? And maybe by giving it too much credit, you're almost normalizing the role that it could potentially play. I think a couple other minor factors. A, you have some people who are seemingly legitimate, let me upset about cruelty to pals, you know, PETA for pals, right? I mean, look, I get it. I felt a twinge of guilt when I'm just wailing on a little red.

chicken. I felt bad about that. I don't think Mallory Rubin will be playing this game, so I understand that. I am also sort of able to separate the pals from living beings. I got over that eventually. I think also part of the backlash is just that people tend to resent when they need to know about something that they hadn't heard of, and suddenly it's everywhere that ubiquity becomes tiresome, right? It's kind of like the Stanley Cup craze. You know, you hear about it once it doesn't really register, you hear about it again and you go, I thought that was a trophy in the NHL. Yeah, right. What are we talking about it?

And then you keep hearing about it and finally you're like, I guess I got to figure out what this is. And then you find out it's just a water bottle. Why are we talking about this? And then the hype just perpetuates itself, right? Where it becomes talked about because it's being talked about. Exactly. And we are contributing to that problem right now on this podcast. It's tough being a Discord.

object. Yeah, I sympathize with that regard. Have you guys unlocked the butcher feature yet? No. Yes. Yes. Yes. So Charity, what happens when you have too many pals and you would like to instead have the resources that that pal generates? Send them to a farm upstate. You get this like butcher knife. And I was like, okay, clearly I was like wondering how this would go, right? I figured like, okay, so what's going to happen is you're going to tap it on the head with this butcher knife. and it'll pop, and then the assets will get, like, you know, you'll collect the assets. That's what I assumed was going to happen, right? But what actually happens is you take the butcher knife out, and then there is a pixelated blurriness put on screen while you wail on the thing. It is like a censored, like, box over the pal while you are beating it to death, and it is squeaking.

And then the censored thing goes away, and, like, the resources pop up, and the pal is just, like, dead with X's over. over its eyes on the ground. So it sort of like leans into the brutality of killing your innocent cute pal rather than, you know, just bopping it on the head and turning it into resources. Yes. Which is definitely not a Nintendo decision, is it? No.

So that takes us to our seventh question. We've already sort of straight into this territory, but where's the line between inspiration and imitation? In other words, is Pal World going to get sued? Matt, you mentioned we tack like onto everything that becomes a genre like any form of our games have always borrowed from and built on competitors and predecessors. But when does it become a clone, a copy? When does it become more than a remix and actively derivative, right?

And, you know, there are a lot of things that you can't copyright in games, most things that you can't, concepts, et cetera, and that is good, right? That kind of prevention serves the consumer. Ultimately, we want innovation. We want these ideas to percolate and people to come up with their own spins on things, but does this potentially cross a line, right? There have been games removed from Steam for alleged or proven asset theft in the past. That's sort of the nightmare scenario here, if you're a fan of Pow World, that it just disappears because Nintendo comes crashing down on you.

Nintendo has blocked and taken down an explicit Pokemon mod for Pow World, which that is not a surprise. You are kind of courting disaster if you do that. And the Pokemon Company has issued a statement, a very vague, unspecific statement, probably for legal reasons. They cannot say the name Pow World here

in case they end up being a proven to be above board here, but the Pokemon company has said, we've received many inquiries regarding another company's game released in January 2024. I leave it to all of you to decide what game that might be. We have not granted any permission for the use of Pokemon intellectual property or assets in that game. We intend to investigate and take appropriate measures to address any acts that infringe on intellectual property rights related to the Pokemon. Might just be a shot across the bow, could be kind of marking territory a prelude to some tangible action. As of now, we don't know.

You know what's funny is like a dragon infinite wealth has like a gratuitous Pokemon knockoff mode in it. So it could be like a dragon infinite wealth they're talking about. We'll see. Yeah. I don't think it is. But I think that like they, Nintendo came in and shut that mod down immediately. Of course. Like almost before you could even hear about the fact that that mod existed, they had shut it down already.

And yet further legal action has not come yet. And I think that that is sort of an indicator that if there was something there for them to do, they would have already done it. Do you guys sort of feel the same way about that? I mean, even though it seems like Power World has been with us forever. I know we're not legal experts, but it has only been a week. since we all really became aware of this, although obviously the concept was out there for some time, so I'm sure that they were aware that this was coming.

I don't know. I don't know that this precludes any possible action down the road. The pocket pair CEO has said that Powerworld cleared a legal review. The quote was, we make our games very seriously, and we have absolutely no intention of infringing upon the intellectual property of other companies. He has said in the past that he was uncomfortable with the Pokemon with Guns label. I'm sure he's pleased that it's brought his.

he has gained so much attention, but he has cited Arc survival evolved, Valheim, Rust, Rimworld, Fortnite, Borderlands as influences and has tried to stay away from the Pokemon infringement. I think the fact that this is a small inexperienced team maybe makes them more sympathetic, but also increases suspicion in some quarters, right? Because the CEO has said that the pals were mostly designed by a single staffer who was a recent graduate. The company had no animators. when Powell World's development began, they used to buy stock assets for their previous games. So they're kind of a fly-by-night figuring this out as we go sort of operation here. And maybe that makes them more susceptible to people saying, well, they must have cut a corner

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So we're getting close to the end here, and this is kind of a big picture question. Number eight, what does Powell World's popularity tell us about how games are getting made, discovered, and sold? We've talked about this a little bit. Memes are supreme, right? It's all about getting the attention, getting surfaced by streamers and content creators making a splash, right?

That is something that gets you in front of a lot of eyeballs. And some of those people get your game. We talked about the low-price game pass effect. That's certainly playing a part here. What do you guys think this says about the landscape of gaming, if anything, if we are to extrapolate from this anomaly? Well, Matt, can you talk about the game pass aspect of this, more, because I know you had thoughts

about GamePass specific, because that to me is in terms of discovered, fascinating, given that in the one corner you have Nintendo, right, on the ropes, and then in the other corner you have

Microsoft ostensibly, you know, like pouring gasoline on a fire. Yeah, they are pouring gasoline on the fire a bit, right? They're like, hey, a hit. It's on our platform. Let's lean into this as much as possible. Yeah, I mean, I love Game Pass.

I'm a big believer in Game Pass as a value for gamers at the very least. You know, the effect on development is sort of developers is sort of murkier to decipher. But as a value for gamers, I'm huge on it. And anything that it comes to Game Pass at least gets my attention. Not only because they put out free games, but more often than not, they will drop good free games. There's sort of like a curation aspect of Game Pass that I have found to be noteworthy. So whenever anything is coming soon on Game Pass, it gets attention. It absolutely gets attention.

and it is sort of a recommendation or an endorsement as well from Microsoft when something shows up on there. They feel that this is a value, right? So there's not a game that is released onto GamePath that doesn't show up on my radar. And the fact that I could jump into this for free rather than committing any money at all, because honestly, I don't know if I would,

even though it's a lower price on Steam, It's not, you know, $70, $60 game. I still don't know if I would have bit the bullet on Steam if I didn't have game pass. Now, obviously, there have been some reports that the Xbox version is a little glitchier than the Steam version. I haven't personally found that. But I also know that the Steam version, one of the big differences from the Xbox version, is that you can have a lot more people playing on your server. in the Steam version,

whereas the Xbox one is much more limited in scope as to the number of people you can play with. But yeah, that free 99 entry point into this game, of course, why wouldn't I check it out? Yeah, this makes me appreciate the power of the Minecraft Roblox generation, right? Because I don't think this is something that's been driven by traditional media.

Obviously, every outlet in the world has covered it now, But this was organic. This was grassroots to some extent, right? Everyone's reacting to the fact that this was organically extremely popular. And I think that's because there's a generation of people who've grown up playing games where they're not necessarily looking for a narrative or a lot of lore. Maybe they just want to build stuff and disassemble stuff and have a chill crafting time, right? The sort of thing that I'm not typically looking for from games millions and millions and millions and millions. of players are looking for exactly that, and they're finding that here and in a lot of other

survival type games. So that to me, I think that is maybe the biggest takeaway here, is that this is what a large part of the audience wants, even if it is not the audience our age for the most part. But there's a buzzy boom bust hype cycle that keeps happening over and over, not to this extent, but whether it was late last year with the finals and lethal company or something like Only Up, which was sort of an asset flip cash in that was ultimately removed from the Steam store, but was kind of buzzy for a while. People wanted to check it out. People were streaming it. People move from game to game like that, right? Like what's the latest trend? What's the new sensation? What are people talking about this week? It's not really the way that I consume games or

grew up consuming games, but I think it's maybe becoming the dominant model. And how world's popularity is maybe the strongest sign yet of that. Yeah, I think that, like, the, the Minecraft generation point is real. And it's been, I think it's been evident for a while, right? Like, I think it's the main thing I thought about playing tears in the kingdom. I was like, okay, they just, a bunch of what they added to this world that they established in breadth of the wild is just turning it into Minecraft, is turning it into,

I mean, it's, like, different, right? but it's sort of so much of the idea that so much of how you spend the post game of playing tears is you're really just going to be crafting a lot using auto build, you know, doing exploration. That really, I think, centers around the new, like the fusion and crafting stuff added in tears that wasn't in Breath of the Wild. And then, yeah, you're right. Seeing that that's also kind of the ideal, that power.

world gravitated toward, it does make me curious, like what the rest of 2024 is going to look like in terms of interacting with that ideal and propagating that ideal. Yeah, which is a good segue to our penultimate question here, which is, is Powell World a flash in the pen? What will its future look like as a game and as a meme as something you have to kind of care about even if you are not playing Power World? And let's just say it avoids legal consequences. It stays on this.

It dodges the rain drops. Legally purchasable. Yeah, they covered their asses just enough to escape any consequences, right? Just in terms of the audience interest. So we know maybe there's some survival crafting fatigue that some people feel, obviously, that hasn't hampered this game's success. Currently, it has some cheating problems that PocketPair is trying to address. Pocket pair has released a roadmap for future features.

So PVP, player versus player, for players themselves and also for pal-on-pal violence, raid bosses, new pals, new locations, cross-play between platforms. All of those things are supposedly on the horizon, although we should note that PocketPair's previous game, Craftopia is still in early access after three plus years. But do you think that when the year is over, when we're talking about, talking about when we're reminiscing about Powell World way down the road. Will it be a remember Power World? Remember that week when we were all obsessed with Power World and we never thought about it again?

Or do you think it will be kind of a constant presence? You know, player accounts will decline. Sales will slow down. But does Powerworld have staying power? I feel like that question is so informed by like it really does feel like there's a huge divergence these days and like the fate of games. Like when you when you describe the flash and the pan road, right? I think of like multiverses.

Like remember when multivary? It was like a two to three month period of multiversus was like the biggest game on earth. And then a month later, there were 10 people playing it. Yeah. Right. It felt like that sharp of a decline. And it's like, yeah, you could go that route or you could be the kind of game that makes a splash. And then somehow, think of Minecraft, right?

Like how old it? Minecraft came out what in the 1950s, right? It feels like that game has just been, it's just been a scene. It went from being, oh, this is a popular, successful game to just being like a scene and a scene for a generation of people, right? And if you pulled me right now, I would air slightly on the side of thinking that how world is going to be a little more multiverses than Minecraft, that it's going to be a little more like it's gross. my reverse a little you know what I mean like it I could see this game sticking around for a while but I don't know I don't and maybe it's just my own personal reaction to it like I I am after I log off this call and after I clock out of work for the day I'm not going like the power world I'm going to play Sekaro you know I mean but again I'm also I'm also a dirty old millennial right so who knows with this Zoomers listening to this episode, they're not going to play Sekiro. They're going to go play some more power world. So what do I know is what I'm saying. Yeah, it's so hard to project, again, to speak authoritatively about something that until very recently we were not aware was about to exist.

But having reached this level of popularity, I think even though there will at some point be a steep decline, you know, it's tough to break through. Everyone wants to have the live service game that mince money forever. And increasingly, companies have found that there's only so much room at the inn, really, and on the market, that Fortnite is one of one and that you can't just keep making those games, that a few of them have cornered the market. And so that makes it more impressive that Powell World has broken through in this way. I guess it will probably, in large part, depend on do they invest in this game? Is this a professional operation? Do they actually keep making it better and giving people reasons to keep playing and keep coming back?

or is this more of, well, we made our many millions of bucks. Now we can move on. Well, Ben, you have to keep in mind, this is not a scam. That is well-established. Very good. Not a scam.

I can tell you that. Being not a scam, I don't think that there's any way you can sell this many units and be a flash in the pan. Like, even if you lose 90% of your player base. 10%

It's still a massive fan base. And also I think I think the other thing that is sort of overlooked here in terms of assessing the longevity of this game is how

almost politicized the fan base is at this point. Like the people who are defending this game are sticking it to Nintendo or sticking it to people who want to be litigious about

Like, people have like an emotional stake in this game being some sort of thing that they can rally behind at this point. And I think there's a lot of staying power with a game when you can, when it achieves that. Like, people are determined to kind of be on Powell World's team now, so to speak. Yes, it's sort of a Powell World soap opera at this point. There will be many more news cycles, possible revelations, ramifications, we will continue to follow it. Which brings us to our final question. We saved the most important one for last.

Who's your favorite pal? Matt, you've got a favorite pal? I do. I don't know how to pronounce it. It's either Dumood or... That's my favorite pal. Is that yours too? You took my favorite.

There's 111. How are you growing attached to these people that you didn't just mercilessly enslave and kill? Have you met? Which is totally different from your relationship. to them in the Pokemon games, I should say. I don't... I mean, Ben, tell Charity why this is clearly the best pal.

Dumud, I'm going to go with. It's probably mud because it's Earth. Right. It's an earth. Yeah. Dumud. He, I don't know if Dumud has a gender, but do mud is a big brown fish that is on land. Sharky-looking fish. Somehow, yeah. So must have gills and lungs. I'm not really sure how the anatomy and physiology of...

do mud works, but he's basically just a bail tank. You know, he's kind of like, he's got the staring eyes, you know, almost like flounder-like off to the side, very brown, very big, big old fin on the top of his head. Yeah. And flopping around on the land. He's like a ground pal. Right. There's no perfect Pokemon parallel to do mud, right?

I mean, you know. I would say, well, also, I want to point out, I have no favorite, because. Because look, I've yet to meet a pal as adorable as the Pokemon Miltank. That is my standard for the designs of this game is miltank. So I will update you guys. All right. We're a pro-Dumad podcast. I'm happy to hear that we agree on that.

We'll convert you, I'm sure. Yeah, it's the hipster pal pick. All right. Have we done it? Have we sufficiently explained how world? This is, as they say, a developing story. So perhaps we will return to it at some point. But either of you have final thoughts on Powell World for now?

Well, you know, I'll see you in court. Your Honor, this is not a scam. It's not a scam. Hey, listen, that line is going in my expense for it. For Powell World is not a scam, all right? You've got to find me to serve the papers. So I'm just going to stay out of your way and keep making my Pokemon knockoffs. I'm looking forward to the Powell World Expended Universe.

Give me the Pal World movie franchise. Give me the TV show. Give me the animated series. The Pow World anime. I see some theme park potential. I smell franchise, baby. All right. If you still have unanswered questions about Powell World or want to share your thoughts about that game or any other game,

please send them to Ringervverse Gaming at gmail.com. Stay tuned to the Ringerverse for a Mint Edition comics catch up on Monday and Midnight Boys on Wednesday. plus a full court press on Percy Jackson on House of Arr, barring the debut of another massively successful video game none of us has heard of. But Mesh will be back in two weeks when Charles Holmes and Jessica Clemens will be here to discuss among other subjects, Suicide Squad, Kill the Justice League, and Halo Season 2. And then, of course, it will be final fantasy season, which I hope that you two will both be back to discuss. Justin. Wait, can I say one thing before we go, which is suicide squad, kill the Justice League, also not a scam. Okay. Just letting me get that. That remains to be seen. That's an open question. We got to check the FAQs on those to make sure that that disclaimer is in there.

Guys, thank you for joining me on this journey of discovery that none of us anticipated taking when this week began. Thanks, pals. Thanks, pals. Thank you to Eduardo Ocampo, another pal. for producing this impromptu podcast. Thanks to our Juno-Ramik pal for clearing some space on the schedule to respond to the pressing POW world crisis. And thanks to any listeners who doubled up on ButtonMash this week. Until next time, treat your pals well. And if you can't do that, please put them out of their misery and devour their remains.