Which is the bigger surprise sales hit this year? Helldivers 2 or Palworld.

Palworld is still in early access and not officially released yet.

Helldivers 2 fir how much people that never played the original mocked and ignored the game when it showed up at showcases and got trailers.

Palworld. Helldivers 2 still had the backing of Sony and was a sequel to a game that had its own little cult following.

On the other hand, you had a small indie team of what started out as only 10 developers turned into a phenomenon that turned into 20 million players within a matter of just a few weeks.

Helldivers 2 may have the better longevity, but Palworld was the bigger surprise.

Palworld, and the sad thing is it's not even a real game. It's AI-stolen assets and some bullshit slapped together that would normally be forgotten steam trash. The problem is we live in an era of moronic streamers making a bunch of garbage popular. Helldivers 2 is at least a real game and a sequel to a well-liked game on PS4. It also seems to be one of those kinds of sequels that takes everything people liked about the first and dials it up to 1000.

Palworld just came out of nowhere and blew up. Helldivers 2 wasn't expected to do much, pretty much everyone wrote it off as just another mediocre game that won't do much (Myself included). Both games blew up, not sure I can give the edge to one or the other as both were quite surprising.

I am fan of original Helldivers, with its twin-stick shooter approach and local coop 4 player mode - so while I recognize the appeal and quality of Helldivers 2, it's not the game for me and honestly I didn't expect it to succeed as much, so that came as quite a surprise.

On the other hand, Palworld, which I only watched my kid play, with its pretty average gameloop and execution, and its "inspired" art feels like fairly expensive and elaborate prank - so its success definitely comes as bigger surprise to me.

Helldivers 2.

Palworld since it's reveal was labeled as Pokémon with guns on PC, having that tag on your game means people will have the disposition to buy it even if its terrible just to see how bad it is because it was a "punch to Nintendo". At the end of the day the market for the game was very wide between Nintendo lovers and Nintendo haters (trying to teach a "lesson" to "very bad" Nintendo LOL). The game is kind of a base building/survival game with taming so you are putting together two genres that have a history of causing "addiction" in a good way obviously. Streamers did their job showcasing the game, and the youtube add was very persistent at least in my country. Also the early access was very cheap and it got the push of marketing from MS and gamepass. The game had everything in their favor to succeed, it only needed to be not terrible and it isn't.

Helldivers 2 on the other hand was labeled as a "generic shooter from Sony", when your game is a Sony game the internet has to hate it, that's the rule lol and people won't buy it to see how terrible it is, they are going to say it's bad even if ends up being great. It had a price tag not that low, not that high but a price tag in the age of shooter f2p games was for many a signal of a major bust. Sony put almost no money on marketing (they did pay to the biggest shooter streamers so that was actually a good move). If you see all these factors there was no way for the game to sell aprox. 8 millions and dominate PSN and Steam for two months but it did because the game is good and people enjoyed their time and they were vocal about it.

So if we are going to talk about the true big surprise it shouldn't be a contest of big bad company vs pure indie company, it should be about everything around each product. From general players perception pre release to the fact that Helldivers 2 was twice more expensive than Palworld.

Which is more surprising? Possibly Helldivers 2, as we had already collectively placed that into the box of niche shooter like its predecessor. While a new IP is always a bit of an unknown, but both are incredibly surprising and good for the industry.

The AI allegations are false:

Palworld for sure. Nobody saw it coming. It is a better game than many give it credit for .