Pocketpair’s Palworld has taken the gaming community by surprise. The game sold out 4 million copies in just 4 days. However, in the thick of the excitement, Pocketpair has made a few false claims and blunders that it later had to apologize for.
Arguably the biggest of those claims was a tweet that it put out on Sunday, January 21, 2024, saying that “#Palworld has the highest concurrent player count of any paid game in the history of Steam!” The developer backed up the claim by sharing a screenshot showing the most played games on Steam with a message to their fans.
“We can’t believe it! Thank you so much to everyone. We really can not thank you enough. The team is hard at work making Palworld even better as we speak!”
ALSO READ: 2K Games’ 31st Union Laid Off “A Very Small Number” Of Staff
However, historians quickly went back into the books to remind Pocketpair that PUBG still holds that record. PMS Jordan responded to the tweet saying, “Not technically true since PUBG hit 3.2 million concurrent back when it cost money”.
Not technically true since PUBG hit 3.2 million concurrent back when it cost money. (It went F2P later)
However, this is still insane! 🤯
— PMS Jordan (@PMS_Jordan) January 21, 2024
A context has now been added to the original tweet that read; “This post claims that Palworld has hit the all-time highest concurrent player count for a paid game on Steam. This is untrue – PUBG set this record as a paid game in January 2018 with 3.2M concurrent players, prior to becoming free to play in January 2022”.
ALSO READ: #9. Best Valentine’s Day Gift Categories For Gamers In 2024
Learning about this piece of history that they omitted, Pocketpair issued an apology in a fresh tweet on Monday, January 22, 2024, while quoting the initial tweet.
“Our apologies, we were unaware that PUBG previously obtained the record before becoming a f2p game,” the studio wrote. “Again, our apologies for this misunderstanding.”
Pocketpair made another blunder on January 20
The claim that Palworld had hit the highest number of concurrent players for a paid game is not the first blunder that Pocketpair has made in the last 72 hours. On Saturday, January 20, the studio put out a tweet announcing an emergency meeting with Epic Games to address connection issues. However, instead of saying Epic Online Services, they wrote Epic Games Backend.
Hello everyone,
Regarding the connection issues when trying to host co-op:
The number of players exceeded 700,000 concurrent players, and a problem occurred in the Epic Games backend.We had an emergency meeting with the Epic Games team and had them add an update to the Epic…
— Palworld (@Palworld_EN) January 20, 2024
The following day, they issued a correction as a comment under the original tweet which read; “A correction to our earlier tweet: We accidentally said [Epic Games Backend] instead of [Epic Online Services, we apologize for this misunderstanding!”
We get it, hitting the level of success that Palworld has achieved can be overwhelming. Pocketpair’s constant tweets and responses have also helped to jazz up the excitement around the game. However, their PR need to get their heads in the game and make sure they double-check every tweet before hitting the send button.
ALSO READ: How To Stop Sweaty Hands When Gaming—9 Tricks
They need to realize that Palworld is now in the eyes of millions of players and every information they put out will be double and triple-analyzed—especially by Pokémon fans who are crying foul that Palworld stole monster designs from their favorite Nintendo series.
Palworld continues to experience server issues as player count surges
Pocketpair continues to grapple with server issues as player count for Palworld continues to surge. At the time of writing this post, Palworld had the highest number of concurrent players today with 918,437 players. Counter-Strike 2 was in distant second place with 476,130 concurrent players while Dota 2 was in third place with 288,091 concurrent players. The count will definitely change as the day progresses.
ALSO READ: 2 Ways To Play PS5 In Tesla Exposed
Pocketpair announced on Sunday, January 21 that Palworld has exceeded 1.3 million players. The surge in player count has led to server outages. The developer noted that the single-player mode was not affected. However, some players were facing connectivity issues in co-op and servers.
Server Outage Notice:
As the number of concurrent players across all platforms exceeded 1.3 million, the Epic Online Service is currently experiencing outages due to an unusually high load worldwide.
Singleplayer is unaffected by this server outage.
This is causing…— Palworld (@Palworld_EN) January 21, 2024
The developer is working with Epic Online Service to stabilize the issue and promised to send out information as soon as it becomes available on X or through their official Discord channel.
