Survival is a popular genre in itself. And to be frank, I tried it and besides the quality issues the game has on Xbox the main gameplay loop is kinda fun. And probably wouldn't so much if it was a straight up Pokemon clone - because yes it has less creatures. So I think the game blows up for two reasons:

1. The Pokemon with guns marketing leads to people trying it out.

2. The survival crafting gameplay keeps people playing.

Since this game uses AI to generate its creatures and steals a lot from Pokemon. I won't be surprised if Nintendo/Pokemon Company takes this to court and this game gets removed like Flappy Bird.

If - and that is a big if - if the Pokemon Company makes out some designs that fly too close to the sun and can be considered copies, then PocketPair only has to remake those designs and push them as an update. The game itself will not be shut down.

They prolly should remake the base models cuz there's evidences they've also stolen some assets.

Not that they can't anymore with all the money they just made in such a short time but dang wouldn't it be funny if TPC tried to actually take them to court over this now's the game got all this popularity xD

6m. units sold now, with a peak of 1.7m peak players.

There are rumours that Sony is trying to get the game to PS5.

^ That would require Sony to allow EA games on PS. I wonder how that will work or if it'll just be an exception.

There's no proof that they did, but if they did, even if it was 100% sourced from Pokémons, I'm not sure TPC would set themselves up for the risk of such a devastating loss in a court case and the precedent it would create. Virtually the entire tech industry has a massive interest that any content spat out by LLMs being declared fair use (NYT is trying, of course, but in their case, the content is identical and it can be easily perceived as so by a layman, not just similar).

I think it's more likely they're just tracing designs like early Lies of P did with Dark Souls, however.

Makes sense. Maybe they have fixed some bugs until then.

It has now dethroned CS:GO/Counter Strike 2's peak. Is this gonna overtake PUBG and break the all time record? That seems insane but at this point with how much momentum it has it feels like there's a genuine chance if it keeps climbing throughout this week.

About to buy a second copy in my house so the kids can play online together. All I can say is my kids love it.

That would be a huge undertaking considering it basically needs to double its concurrent player count to reach PUBG, but hey, it somehow passed Counter Strike on a Tuesday lol. Anything is possible at this point!