I hope the take away from this is that no matter if a game is live service or not it needs to run, not nickel dime players, and be good. Or it will bust.
The palworld devs never worked on Pokemon. The dark and darker devs were, allegedly, employees of Nexon working on a similar game. It’s completely different
Game pass might be a good deal, and I don’t fault anyone for wanting to maximize gaming on a budget, but the transition to subscription based gaming is going to be very bad for studios in the long term.