Kotaku Spent 6 Hours Not Getting A Gun In Palworld. The Game Hit 25 Million Players.

Let me run the numbers. Palworld launched January 19, 2024. Kotaku published impressions on January 22 — three days post-launch, six hours played, zero score, zero formal recommendation. By mid-February, the game had 25 million players on Steam. The URL slug itself is the tell: kotaku.com/palworld-shoot-pokemon-with-guns-impressions-review. Six hours of playtime against a game still being discovered weeks later does not produce something with the word 'review' in the address bar. The math ain't mathing.

The headline is a confession: 'After Playing Palworld For 6 Hours I Still Haven't Shot A Pokémon With A Gun.' Zwiezen writes that he 'realized I had been tricked into playing another goddamn survival crafting game.' The Steam store page — publicly visible before purchase — describes Palworld as an open-world survival crafting game. The trailers show base building. The genre tag says survival. The marketing said exactly what the game was. You cannot be tricked by a product that disclosed its nature in writing. You can only be the reviewer who didn't read the genre description before filing a review of the genre.

For statistical comparison: three months earlier, Kotaku published a 2,800-word philosophical treatise on whether to review Hogwarts Legacy, deployed its full institutional gravitas, and concluded with 'This is not a review.' For Palworld — a game that set Steam early access records and reached 25 million players faster than almost anything before it — Kotaku produced 800 words, no recommendation, and a headline about failing to find a gun. Editorial effort allocated: 3.5x more coverage for the game Kotaku refused to cover than for the game that defined 2024's first quarter. The math ain't mathing.

Zwiezen 'abandoned' the game before reaching level 25 — the specific threshold for the first craftable handgun, the mechanic the entire piece was structured around evaluating. He reported his objective, failed to reach it, and published anyway. Twenty-five million people reached level 25 with no difficulty. Kotaku's archive now contains a permanent record of a man who quit before his own stated goalpost and called it journalism. Six hours. Twenty-five million players. The math ain't mathing.