It's a ridiculous metric anyway. There are dozens of ancient MMOS that still manage to crawl along because a few hundred subscribers is enough to fund one or two developers in maintenance mode effectively forever. See also indie studios like Spiderweb Software who've been sustainably selling games to their fans for decades. See also indie roguelike devs who manage to make their one game a job by having a patreon and a few hundred fans. See also retrogaming. See also the boomer shooter renaissance.

Games on the whole have never been less dead, unless their studio intentionally smothers them by shutting down servers and locking off access.

Wut? It literally just got a major update a month or 2 ago. And it's got great reviews.

How the hell would it be considered "dead" by any metric?

Stupid clickbate 'journalism'

It's a sold game not a live service, as long as they deliverer all updates who cares, the media also had this discussion with Manor Lords decaying numbers, after it sold millions...

No, it's not dead. The number of players is irrelevant.

A "dead game" is a game that needs work but is not under any development. It could be in Early Access, and incomplete. Or, it could be released, but still incomplete (looking at you, 7 Days to Die). Or, it could be an MMO that needs ongoing server maintenance, but they shut the servers down.

A game that is being worked on and making good progress isn't dead. A game that is complete and relatively bug-free, but not being worked on, is not dead. An MMO getting no new content, but just enough labor to keep the lights on and the servers up, is not dead.

I guess an MMO or multiplayer game that has mandatory multiplayer aspects could be considered Dead if there aren't enough players available to reasonably play the game. But Palworld is a single player game, or co-op with friends, not really an MMO.

No, it is not.

I feel this way about Back 4 Blood too. It got a taste of backlash for not living up to the hopes of Left 4 Dead players - but, it has plenty of its own enjoyable elements (Left 4 Dead doesn't really let you run a "build" that "specializes" in one thing and accepts a set of weaknesses). The developers announced they were going to stop updating it - but that only means it doesn't file into the category of junky "Live service" noncompetitive games, which to me is fine. People shouldn't necessarily avoid it on sale, the servers are up and it's still fun.

Palworld is a dead game because the fad is over. All the media outlets and YouTubers made their edgy Ash with the Glock thumbnails.

And outside of that what more is there to talk about. It's just your generic crafting survival early access title.