Palworld’s fairytale run continues. On Tuesday, January 23, 2024, the game hit 1.85 million concurrent players to topple Counter-Strike 2 and become the second-highest charting game on Steam ever. At the time of writing this post, the game has added a few more thousand to that number. Its peak concurrent players now stand at 1,864,421.
Not only has Palworld hit a new high in terms of concurrent players, it has also been the most-played game this week. Since Monday, January 22, 2024, when GameBaba Universe started tracking the number of concurrent players, the game has consistently had over 1 million players, more than doubling the concurrent player count by its closest rivals.
The only game currently ahead of Palworld in concurrent player count is PUBG: Battlegrounds. The game set the record of 3,257,248 concurrent players back in January 2018. Pocketpair celebrated the new milestone in a tweet that also showered appreciation on all the players who have joined the hunt.
“The number of Steam users currently playing #Palworld has exceeded 1.85 milllion! Thank you for playing the game even though it is a weekday! The team is working hard to ensure that you can enjoy the game even more comfortably.”
My wildest guess is that Palworld will eventually exceed 2 million concurrent players on Steam—and that may just happen this weekend—and will hold that record for many years to come. In the last sales announcement, the developer mentioned that the game has sold 6 million copies in just 4 days.
Palworld has already shattered so many records and the team has been amazed at their own achievement. One of the people to comment under the post announcing Palworld’s new concurrent player achievement was Bucky, the community manager at Pocketpair.
“Thank you so much, everyone! Really really unbelievable!,” Bucky wrote.
Palworld employees claimed they received death threats
Since the explosion of Palworld’s popularity, fans of Pokémon have been up in arms against the game claiming that it stole character models from their beloved Nintendo series. Some of the developers at Pocketpair even claimed that they had received death threats. Bucky made a tweet insinuating this on Sunday, January 21, 2024.
“Frantically working through all my DMs and emails! I Promise!” Bucky wrote. “However, you’ll excuse me if I skip over the death threats, threats to the company, and massively outlandish claims. If you’re capable of writing like an actual human being though, I’ll reply asap!”
It’s a shame that people hide behind their keypads to hurl insults at others whom they barely know. Last year, After the release of Resident Evil 4 Remake, the character that played Ada was literally bullied off the internet.
Takuro Mizobe, the CEO of Pocketpair recently granted an interview with Automaton where he addressed several issues around Palworld including how much he was involved in the game. The CEO mentioned that he was predominantly the producer but at some point, ended up directing and working as an optimization engineer for the game. When asked to describe Palworld in his own words, the CEO said:
“Put simply, Palworld is an open-world, survival craft game with the added element of monster-taming/collection. It also takes significant inspiration from real-time strategy and automation games – you build bases, and your Pals work autonomously to support you. I think that these mechanics are quite rare in 3D games.”
In the interview, Mizobe said that when the development of Palworld started, the development team had only 3 to 4 members who were all newly hired. However, a year later 10 more people were hired. In the second year of development, Pocketpair added 20 to 30 more people, and another 10 to 20 in the third year.
“By the way, the art department makes up the largest portion of the team, including motion, background and 3D artists,” Mizobe said. “We also hired more than five new engineers for the project, so the team ended up being quite big.”
Since its launch, Palworld has faced severe server and bug issues. According to PCGamesN, over 50,000 bug reports have been filed. However, Pocketpair continues to work around the clock to fix all the issues as they arise.
