A game that basically cannot be played without the existence of servers which are typically too complex or too expensive or outright banned from an average user with a decent internet connection acting as the server, that is a game that is ‘truly dead’, a game that is not really playable in single player whose multiplayer infrastructure no longer exists.
You can host a few people on your own minecraft or valheim or palworld server, or you can play the whole game single player, and the vast majority of gameplay systems and experiences work in single player.
Compared to say an MMO whose servers are just down, a live service game whose live service is now discontinued, a massive multiplayer fps that just no longer has any dedicated servers, etc.
Palworld is still a playable game getting updates from the devs and its multiplayer capacity still works.
It just is no longer wildly popular, which is again due to its nature of being yet another flavor of the week or month for twitch, yet another open world survival craft game with a goofy gimmick.
It is only dead in the sense of the collective zeitgeist moving on to something else once they got bored of it.
Popular gaming lingo does conflation or concepts with totally different meanings all of the time.
We’ve got ‘dead’ as in unpopular or less popular versus ‘dead’ as in literally unplayable due to lack of infrastructure.
Basically yes, the last part of what you said:
A game that basically cannot be played without the existence of servers which are typically too complex or too expensive or outright banned from an average user with a decent internet connection acting as the server, that is a game that is ‘truly dead’, a game that is not really playable in single player whose multiplayer infrastructure no longer exists.
You can host a few people on your own minecraft or valheim or palworld server, or you can play the whole game single player, and the vast majority of gameplay systems and experiences work in single player.
Compared to say an MMO whose servers are just down, a live service game whose live service is now discontinued, a massive multiplayer fps that just no longer has any dedicated servers, etc.
Palworld is still a playable game getting updates from the devs and its multiplayer capacity still works.
It just is no longer wildly popular, which is again due to its nature of being yet another flavor of the week or month for twitch, yet another open world survival craft game with a goofy gimmick.
It is only dead in the sense of the collective zeitgeist moving on to something else once they got bored of it.
Popular gaming lingo does conflation or concepts with totally different meanings all of the time.
We’ve got ‘dead’ as in unpopular or less popular versus ‘dead’ as in literally unplayable due to lack of infrastructure.