Palworld Proves Friendship is Magic as it Soars to the Top of Steam Player Charts

The title often touted as merely “Pokemon with Guns”, Palworld, has started soaring to the top of Steam concurrent player charts. Palworld just went into Early Access last January 19th.

I Wanna Be the Very Best

Upon checking Steamdb, we can see that Palworld has crept up out of nowhere and secured a lofty spot as the 5th highest all-time peak concurrent player count – on Steam alone. At its peak a few hours ago as of writing, the game has been able to reach a staggering 1,291,967 concurrent players. This astounding feat has dethroned the likes of Baldur’s Gate 3 (876k highest count), Hogwarts Legacy (879k), New World (913k), Elden Ring (953k), and even Cyberpunk 2077 (1 million). 

Palworld continues to impress even further as the games above it on the Steam Charts are all free-to-play games such as Lost Ark and Dota 2. Essentially this means that Palworld is the top most-played paid game at the moment. While not dismissing the achievement, Palworld’s current price is merely $26.99, which is considerably lower than the full-priced juggernauts just below it. 

The official Palworld X account (formerly Twitter) has been happily joining everyone in this concurrent player count journey, frequently Tweeting (or x-ing?) the game’s milestones. 

Salebox for Palworld

Of course, the number of concurrent players isn’t the only metric that should be considered for this surprise overnight hit. Right before its release, Palworld was in the #3 spot for “Top Wishlists”, sitting just below Hades 2 and above Silksong, and Black Myth: Wukong, among other titles. 

This wishlist popularity translated directly into hard sales. Within the first 8 hours of releasing into Early Access, Palworld was able to sell a staggering 1 million copies. Within the first 24 hours, this number rose to an impressive 2 million copies sold. Eventually, the sales reached 4 million copies across all platforms in its first 72 hours (or 3 days). 

What makes this even more monumental is the fact that Palworld states that this is sales, and not installs or players. As the game also launched concurrently on Game Pass, having this many sales is yet another monumental feat. The official Palworld social media states that sales figures showed that approximately 86,000 copies are sold per hour. 

Not all Sunshine and Rainbows

But with this much power, comes much responsibility – or however that phrase goes. Because of the unanticipated success of the game, it’s no surprise that hundreds of thousands of players were trying to get into the game’s advertised multiplayer modes. This caused the game’s servers to get absolutely hammered, which essentially led to server instability and other connectivity issues. 

Players from across the world, and from different platforms, have had some difficulty joining multiplayer lobbies. But it looks like developer Pocketpair is on top of things, springing into action and providing frequent updates through its social media channels. 

Specifically, Epic Online Services is being mentioned as being one of the more frequently unstable servers. The game also enforces lower population multiplayer lobbies on Xbox Consoles and PC Game Pass users, due to the nature of how Microsoft’s servers operate. Single-player game instances are unaffected by the connectivity issues and outages (as expected).

What’s a Palworld?

For those unaware of what the heck this game is, it’s easy to simply dismiss it as Pokemon but much, much sillier. However, this shouldn’t discount the fact that Palworld is a respectable survival game in its own right, with cutesy creatures that are trying their best not to get noticed by Nintendo’s lawyers. 

Palworld is an open-world survival crafting game at its heart, but with the added Pals roaming the landscape. You will start by doing the usual survival crafting gameplay loop of gathering basic tools which you will then use to create basic buildings that will allow you to create more advanced gathering tools, ad infinitum. However, the kicker here is that you can capture Pals (the game’s term for Pokemon) and then use them in various ways around your base.

For example, water-based Pals might be able to help you maintain your crops by spraying all your plants with nourishment. Fire-based Pals can automate your cooking process, perfectly roasting all those weak Pals that didn’t make the cut. Yes, that’s right – you can also harvest Pals for food and parts, making this cutesy game have some dark humor as its undertones. 

Pal-kemon!

Developer Pocketpair should be quite happy with how things are turning out for their Early Access title. Palworld has been able to secure itself as one of 2024’s surprise hits, and hopefully, the team can keep up this tremendous momentum. Server instability and issues will eventually go away, but post-launch support will be vital to keeping this game alive. They already plan to add some new Pals post-launch.

The game also seems like the perfect title to boot up into your SteamDeck while you kick back, relax, and partake in some forced labor. 

In other news, check out AI Limit is An Upcoming Soulslike That  Will Spring Into Action In 2024, and Visions of Mana Surprises Everyone In The Xbox Developer Direct 2024.