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Palworld has already sold 5 million copies, and has the 3rd highest concurrent player count on Steam of all time

Yesterday I posted the feel-good story of Palworld, a game frequently described as Pokemon with guns. It launched into Early Access on Steam and Game Pass, and wound up having so many concurrent players that the servers buckled under the strain. Developer Pocket Pairs had to issue a statement to reassure people that they were…

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UPDATE: I’ve been changing the sales numbers and concurrent player counts as Palworld keeps surging into the stratosphere.

ORIGINAL STORY: Yesterday I posted the feel-good story of Palworld, a game frequently described as Pokemon with guns. It launched into Early Access on Steam and Game Pass, and wound up having so many concurrent players that the servers buckled under the strain. Developer Pocket Pairs had to issue a statement to reassure people that they were working on the connection problems.

In fact, Pocket Pairs said they had to have an emergency meeting with Epic to rush out a backend update because the player count was so high.

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“We have confirmed that this has resolved the connectivity errors and issues when hosting co-op games on Xbox and PC. You should notice an improvement in connectivity and the errors should start to disappear shortly. Thank you for your continued support of Palworld.” wrote Pocket Pair.

Clearly the server problems are not diminishing the sheer enthusiasm people have for enslaving cute animals and making them work in factories until they die, though. In just 24 hours, Palworld has sold over 2 million 3 million 5 million copies, an incredible number, especially when you take into account that it’s an Early Access game.

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UPDATE: Palworld just keeps getting bigger somehow. Palworld has reached an even more massive concurrent player count of 1,582.482. That’s enough to secure it 3rd place on the leaderboard of peak concurrent players, as measured by SteamDB, beating out the likes of Baldur’s Gate 3 and Cyberpunk 2077 in the process.

The developers claim that this makes Palworld “has the highest concurrent player count of any paid game in the history of Steam!” but that’s not quite accurate. PubG has the highest concurrent player count of any game on Steam and achieved that accolade when it was a paid game.

Those numbers also mean Palworld is roughly 240,000 people away from managing to beat out Counter-Strike 2’s highest player count and snag 2nd place.

But it gets better. When I posted yesterday’s story the game had managed to hit a peak of just over 370,000 players, which is already an impressive stat. Now, though, the game has managed to capture over twice that number, hitting speak player count of 855, 706. As I write this, there’s just under 850,000 people in-game, making it the second most played game behind Counter-Strike 2.

That peak concurrent player count is the 10th highest in Steam history. Baldur’s Gate 3 sits in 9th with 875,343, and Hogwarts Legacy is in 8th with 879,308. Just a few days into launch, Palworld has a very real chance of racing past both of them and potentially even breaking the 1 million player barrier which would put it into contention for 5th place with Cyberpunk 2077.

It’s doing all of this without even accounting for the Game Pass side of things. Sadly the Game Pass version only supports 4 player co-op as opposed to Steam’s much bigger player count which could be why Palworld doesn’t seem to be on Xbox’s trending games list.

Not bad for a game that some people argue is a poor Pokemon ripoff and is being accused of lazy designs by some folk.

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