/v/ has become a Palworld board

It's not astroturfed. The game has enough meme potential on the surface to rope in r-slurred gaymers on its own.

“it's Pokémon with guns!”

It'll die down in a month, the game is just a basic butt early access survival game with Pokémon in it.

It's not, you can't exactly fake the million concurrent players.

R-slurs tend to want to talk about whatever crap they're playing, so of course the fotm would flood the board

There was a trailer for it at The Gay Awards (I think) not too long ago that got it on people's minds, but I think at the time nobody was really taking it seriously. It was like, "this could be cool but they'll ruin it somehow."

Then the devs paid out streamer bounties to have it advertised the day or two before release, got some nice shock value out of it - not really clickbait which is the funny part, it's more just showing off the style of the game - and that plus the interesting preview got a lot of people and thinking this could finally be the one.

Game comes out and against all odds is actually fun on more than a surface level, also very few technical issues which is some kind of miracle. Price tag is reasonable too. They played very smart and are reaping the rewards.

It's like Apex Legends, the devs got big streamers to play the game, the rest is probably natural interest.

Like Valheim or New World, it's the next "open world game in well-known genre but with a twist" that stays for a month and then is nearly forgotten. As for astroturfing, specific types of digital media (vtubers being a well-known example) attract people who refuse to stop posting about them, and who create new low-effort threads when the top thread already is about the topic, so I think it's spammed but by actual players of the game rather than advertisers.