Do you remember Palworld? That crazy game people described as being Pokemon with guns that launched just under two weeks ago and took the world by storm? Yeah, well, it’s still doing pretty well for itself, as shown by developer Pocket Pair announcing it has hit some major milestones.
The last time I checked in with Palworld it had sold around 8 million copies, already making it a gigantic success considering its budget was 6.78 Million USD, according to Pocket Pair CEO Takuro Mizobe. It also managed to become the second-highest-played game in Steam’s history with over 2 million concurrent players logging on the enslave cute monsters and force them to work in factories.
Palworld also continued to draw in huge numbers of concurrent players on Steam, peaking at 1,471,270 in the last 24 hours.
New figures announced by Pocket Pair indicate Palworld has just kept on going and isn’t slowing down. According to them, Palworld how now surpassed a total of 19 million players across Steam and Xbox. According to their breakdown, that’s 12 million people on Steam and 7 million on Xbox.
Breaking this down into sales data is slightly trickier. We know for a fact that everybody on Steam has bought the game, meaning Palworld has achieved at least 12 million sales in just under 2 weeks. Over on Xbox, the numbers are far more difficult to judge since Palworld is available on Xbox Game Pass as well as being buyable on the storefront.
Let’s do some fun math, shall we? Palworld sold 8 million copies by January 24, during which the game was available at a discounted price of $26.99 on Steam. Using that as a baseline it adds up to $215.92 million. It then sold another 4 million copies at its full price of $29.99, which equates to another $119.96 million. If we combine those two numbers we can reasonably assume Palworld has generated roughly $335.88 million in revenue from Steam. Not bad for a game with a budget of just $6.78 million.
Of course, those are very rough numbers that don’t account for how many sales may have been made on Xbox at a different price. However, I’d say the total is at least in the ballpark and provides a decent idea of how absurdly successful Palworld has become.
On the Xbox side of things, Microsoft put out an official post on the Xbox Wire today confirming that Palworld is the biggest 3rd party game in Game Pass history. They also revealed that the game had managed to a peak player count of nearly 3 million. Given this monumental level of success, it’s not surprising that in the very same blog post, Microsoft confirmed that they are working with Pocket Pair to enable dedicated servers to bring the player count up to par with Steam, as well as add crossplay. They are even, “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.”
The big question is whether Palworld could go on to sell more than Pokemon. The last Pokemon game launched, which was Pokemon Scarlet/Violet, has sold 23.23 million copies, so it has a ways to go just yet. Considering the rate at which copies are being snapped up though, it really isn’t hard to imagine Palworld, the game accused of ripping off Pokemon, outselling its own inspiration.





