In just three days, Palworld has achieved another milestone, reaching the third-largest Steam player count peak of all time despite launching in early access.
Palworld‘s explosive popularity has been well-documented over the weekend. Its concurrent player count upon launch on Jan. 19 already put it into Steam’s top five, Twitch viewership of the game skyrocketed above the likes of Fortnite and Grand Theft Auto 5, and it’s already sold at least four million copies across Steam and Xbox. That sales record is particularly impressive when something like Spider-Man 2, a major PlayStation 5 exclusive based on one of the most famous superheroes on the planet, took 11 days to hit five million sales.
Looking at Palworld’s player count on SteamDB, while it’s certainly dipped, it’s otherwise steadily climbed up and up since launch. At time of writing, its concurrent player count peaked around 8am CT at 1,582,482. This officially makes it the third most-played game on all of Steam, only losing out to PUBG: Battlegrounds (which peaked at 3,257,248 concurrent players in 2018) and Counter-Strike 2 (which peaked at 1,818,773 concurrent players in May 2023). That’s an incredible achievement for an indie studio like Pocketpair, especially considering how popular those other two games are.
It speaks to Palworld’s marketing that it has surpassed other major multiplayer titles like Apex Legends, Dota 2, and Call of Duty. Its premise of a survival game where you fight Pokémon-like creatures with guns, capture them, and use them as slave labor naturally caught a lot of peoples’ interest, though the fact so many have stuck around points to Palworld being a legitimately good game once you look past the memes. Word of mouth no doubt helped too but, whatever the cause, Palworld doesn’t seem like a flash-in-the-pan success that will fizzle out in a week or two. If anything, the game being early access means it can potentially grow in popularity once new features are implemented—even more so should the game be ported to PlayStation and/or Nintendo Switch.
Palworld hasn’t been without notable backlash, though. The internet is rife with accusations of Pocketpair actually ripping off Pokémon designs and using AI artwork. As it stands, though, these are just accusations, and they’ve apparently turned into death threats against the studio according to Pocketpair CEO Takuro Mizobe. For now, there seems to be very little that could put a stop to Palworld’s growing popularity, but it remains to be seen how long this momentum can keep up.
