Palworld's explosive success earlier this year made developer Pocketpair heaps of money, but its CEO would rather make an indie-sized game over something that could "go beyond AAA."

Palworld was developed using the money Pocketpair made from its two previous games, Craftopia and Overdungeon, according to a GameSpark interview with CEO Takuro Mizobe (translated by Google Translate and DeepL). And it paid off: Palworld's survival-meets-Pokémon genre mashup rocketed it to success, raking in "tens of billions in yen," which is around $70 million, enough to make a game at a AAA scale. Mizobe, however, says Pocketpair's "structure" isn't equipped to handle something that big and that he's more interested in smaller games.

Mizobe says "there aren't any" games he wants to make that would require a huge budget. "I want to pursue something that I think is interesting as an indie game."

Last month, Palworld community manager John "Bucky" Buckley urged people to spend "as much money on indies as you can," in an interview with YouTube channel Going Indie. Buckley, as well as Mizobe it seems, want the indie sector to thrive as much as the AAA live service games that release every year. Palworld has received several updates since its release in early access, but Pocketpair hasn't pledged to keep it going indefinitely after it's finished. Eventually, it's going to move onto the next thing.

Although it's unlikely we're going to see the back of Palword for some time. Pocketpair recently formed Palworld Entertainment in collaboration with Sony to take care of "global licensing and merchandising activities associated with Palworld outside of the interactive game," according to the official announcement. So, whatever Pocketpair's next game ends up being, Palworld's success will continue to benefit the studio.

Still, Mizobe's interest in making more indie games instead of one massive follow-up to Palworld isn't something we see very often. Most studios go bigger and bigger until it doesn't work anymore. Part of Palworld's appeal was that it wasn't trying to be the next game to spend your life in; it just happened to be so good that people wanted to do that anyway. And it didn't take a big-budget, hyper-polished experience to win millions of people over. If Palworld was that kind of game, the risk of failure could've been devastating, so I'm not surprised Pocketpair doesn't want to dramatically change its strategy.

Last week, Inflexion Games published a YouTube video in which CEO Aaron Flynn and art and audio director Neil Thomson assessed the current state of Nightingale and where the studio hopes to take its gaslamp fantasy survival game next. Inflexion's assessment was unconventionally frank: "We are not satisfied with where the game is at, we're not satisfied with the overall sentiment, we're not satisfied with our player numbers," Flynn said.

Despite the video's vaguely uncomfortable air—watching it felt like the two developers were expecting me to scold them—it's admirable for its candor. In updates released since Nightingale's early access debut in February, Flynn says the studio has worked to address the "shortcomings of the experience," adding a much-requested singleplayer mode and a host of quality-of-life updates. To Nightingale's credit, while its Steam rating sits at an overall "Mixed," its recent reviews have come in at a rosier "Mostly Positive."

With those basic improvements in place, Inflexion's spent the last few months on overhauls for the overall gameplay experience. While Nightingale will maintain its core conceit of adventuring between dimensions of a gaslamp fantasy setting, Inflexion is hoping to add more structure to those adventures. Thomson said that Nightingale has been "almost too open world, too self-motivated in terms of goal-setting." To address that, Inflexion is working to better communicate to the player where they're at in the game's progression, what goals they should pursue next, and what they'll be able to do along the way.

Even better, Inflexion's worked to bring a big improvement to what everyone really wants from a survival game: building a cool house. Inflexion's increasing Nightingale's build limits so players can place more pieces and build "more creative, more expressive estates." Before, Nightingale had been fairly restrictive in the size of structures you could create, but Thomson said the higher build limit is a "multiple-time increase."

Flynn finished the video by saying he's "extremely confident" that Inflexion is bringing Nightingale to a state that meets its own expectations. Thomson agreed, saying the studio's made "Nightingale, but better." Inflexion is hoping to release the latest slate of improvements in an update later this summer.

The last time we heard about Ark 2, the sequel to the popular dinosaur survival RPG, it was scheduled to come out by the end of this year in early access. Although it's been over a year since that news came out, when Microsoft put it on its list of playable demos at Gamescom, it seemed like we'd finally get an update on the Vin Diesel-starring sequel. And then it got removed.

"Ark 2 was originally listed as playable on the Xbox booth—this mention was made in error, and has been removed," reads the editor's note at the bottom of the post. We were this close to seeing evidence that Ark 2 is in fact a real videogame and not just a name attached to a bizarre trailer with Vin Diesel and Auli'i Cravalho riding a dinosaur.

Neither Studio Wildcard nor its co-developer Grove Street Games has said anything about the project since it missed its original 2023 release date. If Ark 2 is real and still coming out this year, it's going to be one of the weirdest surprise drops we've had in a while.

Microsoft paid a whole $2.3 million to have Ark 2 exclusively on Game Pass for three years, according to a 2022 SEC filing. It's been four years since the game was announced and nobody is even sure if it's a proper sequel to Ark: Survival Evolved. That answer may lie in Ark: The Animated Series, but the last seven episodes of the show have yet to appear on Paramount+.

The first Ark remains a popular multiplayer sandbox game on Steam, actively hovering around the top 50 most played games. The remaster, Ark: Survival Ascended, does not, but it's still in early access and steadily receiving updates, like the ability to paint your dinosaurs in Olympic colors, apparently. There are no shortage of people eager for Ark 2, and it'll be a shame if we're still in the dark on it this time next year.

Once Human, the multiplayer open world survival horror game that released last month, has a big patch out today with loads of bug fixes, quality of life improvements, and some special events for August.

One of the biggest changes is to low level motorcycles—they've been sped up. This will come as a relief for players who may feel overwhelmed at how much stuff there is to wander around and collect in the open world, but they'll have to be careful. Apparently there's a bug that was introduced with the update that makes your bike take damage when turning. Hopefully they'll get that ironed out soon.

Another big change is to memetic specializations, the perks you can get every five levels in Once Human. These are a big deal, as they allow you to tailor your build to your preferences, improving on things like building, gathering, and survival. However, once you lock them in there's only a couple times you get to reset them, leading some players to get stuck with builds they don't like. This patch changes that, allowing players to gather memetic specialization memory fragments (say that five times fast), which can be used to respec. No more build fomo!

For those that enjoy spending more time at home growing mushrooms than wandering around shooting the dystopic nightmares of capitalism's past, there's an update to the farming system. They've added continuous farming, which is a function that automatically replants the last thing you had going with the same configuration. Fewer clicks, same great mushroom taste.

Also featured are a number of bug fixes and UI improvements. For example, now you can click on Monoliths, Cargo Conquests, and other icons with your map open. Public Crisis Events will have automatic invitations that go out to other players that you join up with, facilitating voice comms in the heat of the moment.

Finally, they've got some event type things you'd expect to see from a live service game. Login bonus events start on the 1st, 8th, and 15th featuring some fancy cosmetics you can acquire. A Wilderness Express Event starts on August 15, which looks kind of like a Mad Max featurette that gives you bonus points for crashing into stuff. The Secure on Sight Event starting August 22 rewards players for defeating enemies and collecting Specimen Cards.

Once Human and its latest patch are available now on Steam—it's free-to-play.

A researcher has built a pipeline of tools to turn one of Google Maps' 3D tiles into a world of voxels in Minecraft, with the result being a surprisingly good looking and just deeply impressive process that spits out voxelized versions of the earth. Created by graduate student Ryan Hardesty Lewis at Cornell Tech in New York, the Voxel Earth technique spits out voxels that can be exported to Minecraft, a browser, or whatever it is you want to see a bit of voxelized Earth.

"The pipeline we developed starts with Google’s high-resolution 3D Tiles, which are then decomposed into voxels, assigned colors and textures, and exported," Lewis told SIGGRAPH. "We use an algorithm to assign color and material properties based on the original photogrammetry data, which makes the world vastly more recognizable, rather than being a little more than colorless blocks in town-like shapes."

That's the basics, which seems fairly straightforward, right? Match colors, make voxels. It's the next part that makes it impressive—to me, at least.

"We also design an [machine learning] algorithm that then maps these voxels to Minecraft blocks, all the while preserving the environmental context and functionality within the game," said Lewis. "For example, water blocks signifying a river might normally be just blue voxels, but we can do things like recognize the elevation and extent to say it is a river or ocean, and replace it with a water block instead in a Minecraft representation."

Lewis says he hopes it can be used by educators to turn maps into dynamic lessons in fields like geography, environmental science, and urban planning. He's also sure that gamers will enjoy using it to play around with real-world locations.

Lewis will present a paper about his technique at the upcoming SIGGRAPH conference, a specialist computing group dedicated to the study of computer graphics. PC Gamer has previously covered some wondrous graphics and simulation innovations out of SIGGRAPH—like the eye-popping glory of putting on socks.

You can read a full interview with Lewis on SIGGRAPH's website, and you can check out more details and gifs of the project in action on voxelearth.org. Those industry professionals lucky enough to attend SIGGRAPH will be able to go see Voxelizing Google Earth and play around with it next month.

Crafting pretty houses and tackling giant bosses with friends is no longer enough, for a crafting and survival game. The announcement for upcoming Stormforge at today's PC Gaming Show demands we also tangle with unnatural magical disasters like tornadoes, firestorms, and the inevitable firenadoes.

Stormforge has that now-popular cel-shaded art style, easy to follow and pleasing to look at. I especially love the little cartoonish puffs of dust underfoot as characters run and the broad and bright arcs of color behind sword swings.

Showing off some mining and its action-RPG third person combat, Stormforge definitely brings some of the same vibes as genre favorites like Valheim—especially with how comfy the cottage interiors look—but with a world ravaged by constant powerful storms. It takes place across several biomes: forests, mountains, and deserts full of giant bipedal lizard enemies. It looks a bit more magical than your standard survival crafting game too, with water-slinging mage class alongside the usual sword guy and archer girl character choices. 

You can have up to eight players working together to deforest the countryside in record time, since you’ll need to gather materials of all kinds to build a home-away-from-home. I’d recommend a nice field stone foundation and some storm shutters in the face of pesky firenado weather, and maybe don’t mention them to your insurance company.

In between gathering and building your dream-cottage, you’ll also need to explore the procedurally generated landscape in search of treasure, equipment upgrades, and boss enemies. You’ll also be able to take some of that storm energy for yourself—or hopefully negate some of the woes you’d normally encounter with each magical storm.

Stormforge is forecasted to arrive sometime in 2025 on PC, and you can wishlist it now on Steam.

With only a few weeks left until the Steam Summer Sale, you might think Valve would ease off the gas on its near-constant festival sales. You'd be wrong. The latest in Steam's onslaught of genre fests is a celebration of simple joys like scrounging, avoiding starvation, and sprinting pantsless through the woods until you learn how to turn plant fiber into clothes.

While the name might not have the best mouthfeel, the Steam Open World Survival Crafting Fest is offering discounts all week long on survival classics. Terraria's at half price for $5, Rust is up for grabs at $20, and No Man's Sky is down to $30—the cheapest all three have been in the last two years.

Recent survival crafting favorites are getting their share of sales, too. February's supernatural survival driver Pacific Drive is 20% off for $24. If you want more of a fantasy flavor for your crafting, January's early access banger Enshrouded has a matching 20% discount for $24.

Let me sneak in a personal recommendation while I have you: Consider Kenshi, currently 60% off for twelve bucks. Not nearly as Rust-y as a lot of what's on sale this week, Kenshi has some admittedly rough edges, but it's an excellent survival RPG sandbox set in a world that's somewhere between Fallout wasteland and Morrowind surreality.

There's more than just sales, too. The fest also brings us the demo for Aska ahead of its early access release in June, meaning you can get an early hands-on look at what Valheim might be like if its vikings understood the importance of task delegation.

The Steam Open World Survival Crafting Fest runs until 10 AM PT on June 3, 2024.