Week in Views - Call of Duty Warzone: Mobile's debut, Palworld inspires Tencent, and GDC 2024 takeaways
- We've created a weekly digest where the members of the PocketGamer.biz team share their thoughts and go that little bit deeper on some of the more interesting things that have happened in mobile gaming in the past week
The games industry moves quickly and while stories may come and go there are some that we just can't let go of…
So, to give those particularly thorny topics a further going over we've created a weekly digest where the members of the PocketGamer.biz team share their thoughts and go that little bit deeper on some of the more interesting things that have happened in mobile gaming in the past week.
Paige Cook
Call of Duty Warzone: Mobile generates $1.4m in first four days
Call of Duty Warzone has managed to generate $1.4 million in just its first four days, which is impressive, but you can’t help but think Call of Duty Mobile managed to do $4.2 million in the same number of days. It’s quite the difference.
So why is it off to a slower start? Have players finally reached the point where they’ve had enough Call of Duty and different ways to play? I don’t necessarily think so. The IP is and probably always will be an absolute giant.
However, for a game that has a hefty initial 1.5GB download followed by a bigger 5GB download, there are certainly some performance issues. The way the game streams graphical assets means you’re sometimes playing with a less than desirable visual appearance, and you can forget playing it at all unless you have a high-end phone.
The game does state that graphics improve with play, which, in my experience, they did to an extent, but there were still some issues. Add on top of that bugs and some instances of it just crashing, and it leaves something to be desired.
But again, this is Call of Duty, and the franchise has a huge following, so it’s one I'm interested in keeping an eye on and how it performs.
I think if the team can iron out some of these issues sooner rather than later, then the pros the game has, such as smooth controls and cross-progression, could see it rival its own predecessor in the long run.
Aaron Astle
Report: Tencent's top studios developing Palworld-like mobile games
It comes as little surprise that game developers would be jumping onto the Palworld bandwagon after the game’s major success in January - right to be called a phenomenon at the time.
And even if it’s not dominating every gaming conversation two months on, it’s clearly still a big enough deal for other devs to want a slice of the pie.
Palworld is the biggest third-party Xbox Game Pass launch ever, after all, and that’s even more impressive coming from a relatively unknown studio - at least compared to the industry giants.
Speaking of, the Chinese giant Tencent reportedly has two Palworld-like games in the works, being developed by TiMi and Lightspeed.
For now we can only wait and see how these games turn out, and wonder if their creature designs will rub up just that bit too close to Pokémon’s too…
Craig Chapple
GDC is always a big week in the annual games industry calendar. It's a time to take the temperature of the industry, learn what's big and what's not, and get a glimpse of where things are headed.
The event came at a time when the industry, and those that work within it, are reeling from a series of layoffs that has seen thousands of people lose their jobs.
This year's show definitely had the feeling of a sector in transition and coming to terms with macroeconomic factors and some business strategies that woefully overestimated industry growth and cost developers dearly.
If you're interested in learning more about this year's GDC, please check out my much more in-depth takeaways at the link above, where I delve into the lack of big announcements at the show, how Godot is taking on Unity, AI and web3 trends, and how developers feel about the state of the industry.