Yesterday, we recapped the ongoing drama with Singularity 6’s cozy mini-MMO, Palia. The short version is that the game hit beta last summer and has been launching on different platforms ever since, all while weirdly obfuscating the fact that it’s still in beta. For example, as we noted, the game’s Steam launch early this week bears no mention of beta or any early access tag. If you didn’t read the reviews, you’d assume this was a fully launched game. Even the game’s official site doesn’t mark it out as a beta MMO that players will be testing. Anger over so-called “misinformation” on the part of the studio led to a cozy riot in Discord, and S6 bizarrely acknowledged “the confusion around Palia’s status on steam” without acknowledging that it was creating that confusion with its own lack of candor.
If you were hoping that the increase in player and press pressure on the studio would cause it to be more forthright with the community, we’ll be dashing those hopes today. That’s because S6 posted a dev update last night and basically just doubled down on the whole thing.
“We want to clear the air: since our Open Beta launch back in August 2023, the game remains as a title still in Open Beta. Know that we’ll keep our players updated with as much information as possible as we approach what we consider to be our official launch. We’re aware that there has been feedback regarding our messaging and status on various platforms, but the emphasis is that Palia is free-to-play and available for anyone to try. It is a continuous, ongoing effort, and we are committed to providing patch updates with new content, improvements, and bug fixes well into the future.”
The problem, of course, is that the studio is “clear[ing] the air” only in quickly buried blog posts read by superfans who already know the game’s status, not where it actually matters: on the front page of the website and the platform pages where the game is being marketed to new players, who are the people being confused, disappointed, and provoked into leaving negative reviews when they log into the game and find it’s very much a beta in every way. The free-to-play nature of the game is great, but it’s just not relevant to the fact that the game is being promoted on these platforms via lies of omission as a launched and complete experience when it is most definitely still an early access test environment, as the devs themselves reiterate when talking about the 178 updates made to the game since it began.
S6 just isn’t being fully honest with gamers right now, and it’s a damn shame.
