I have not played Palworld but I love that it has exposed the greed and capitalist rot of the company that makes Pokemon. Seriously, the "old guard" video game giants like GameFreak, Valve, etc. are putting out lazy content and sucking up billions from micro-transactions, lazy retreads, and subscriptions. It's just funny to see capitalists be bad at capitalism.
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Also the timeline for that doesn't line up. AI generated art was absolute dogshit at the point in the dev cycle where it could have been used, and by the time it reached the "maybe make some concept art to be reimagined as a 3d model" level they'd have to have been in the final stretch towards making it playable. Even now, "AI art" for a 3d game is theoretically using it to upscale, clean up, and detail a rough sketch, something that's only been done in proof-of-concept things AFAIK.
They did seemingly just straight up rip pokemon 3d models and then change them up in blender though which is extremely funny and literally stealing directly from Nintendo is laudable in almost any circumstance, but they are probably going to get completely fucked in the courts over it, lmao.
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