19 million players. It’s an incredible launch for a game that wasn’t on too many folks’ radar. But the team at Pocketpair took parts of two popular genres (survival and collecting) and combined them with a game that runs reasonably well for games in the survival genre.
On the Xbox side, it was revealed that Palworld has eclipsed more than 7 million players on the platform and scored the biggest third-party launch in Game Pass history. It recently hit a peak of nearly 3 million daily active Xbox users, giving it the #1 spot ahead of Fortnite and Call of Duty. It’s an insane accomplishment for the small team at Pocketpair and feels like a Fortnite-type moment for the survival genre.
Games like H1Z1 showed the Battle Royale genre was special before games like Fortnite and PUBG took it to the next level. Games like Valheim, Rust, ARK, and many more laid the foundation for the survival genre. Palworld is giving the genre a Fortnite moment by mixing in Pokemon-style animal collecting to incredible success.
Pocketpair CEO Takuro Mizobe gave a shoutout to the fans and promised these first few weeks are only the beginning:
“The response from fans has been tremendous and it’s incredible to see the millions of players around the world enjoying Palworld. This is just the beginning for us and Palworld, and the feedback we’re gathering while in Game Preview will allow us to continue to improve the experience for Pal Tamers across all platforms.”
Xbox also talked about what they are doing to help the dev team make Palworld a success on all platforms.
“On Xbox’s part we’re working with Pocketpair to help provide support for Xbox versions of the game. We’re providing support to enable dedicated servers, offering engineering resources to help with GPU and memory optimization, speeding up the process to make Palworld updates available for players, and working with the team to optimize the title for our platform.”
Palworld ended up hitting an all-time peak of 2.1 million on Steam. Only PUBG hit higher numbers at 3.2 million shortly after its launch.
It’ll be interesting to see how AAA publishers react to Palworld. We saw a big push into Battle Roayle that ended up being a big hit for publishers like EA and Activision Blizzard. Ubisoft couldn’t crack into Battle Roayle, but if I were them I would think about how to use the Rabbids franchise with a survival/Palworld-type game.
Palworld’s dev team did release a roadmap last week with future updates including PvP, Raid Bosses, Pal Arena, Steam-Xbox crossplay, and more in the works.