Nintendo fans must be seething right now, I cannot imagine how Gamefreak personnel are holding up.
If you thought the small indie developed part open-world survival crafting and part monster tamer game “Palworld” managing a million sales in just eight hours wasn’t stellar enough, the game itself has quickly become a sensation as total sales having already exceeded two million units within the first day.
Palworld was released on January 19 for Xbox Series, Xbox One, and PC through Steam and the Microsoft Store. Such figures are immensely impressive for a brand new IP let alone a title made by a smaller studio such as Pocket Pair.
And as previously mentioned, the game managed a million units sold, despite being available via Microsoft’s game pass subscriptions, with a lot of similarities being made regarding the monster design between Palworld and Pokemon, because of course Nintendo were the first and only corporation on the planet to come up with the concept of capturing monsters, I mean who has even heard of Monster Rancher?
With the Pokemon franchise going stale and downright predatory with subsequent releases looking like garbage, featuring less and less new Pokemon to discover alongside becoming general buggy piles of rubbish, there has been a desire from fans for third party monster capture titles, such as the likes of Temtem which was quite successful.
But obviously, Palworld transcends the whole capture, battle and train mantra that other titles are notorious for, rather your objective is to survive, build bases and exploit the various “pals” that inhabit the world to assist you with construction, mining or perhaps mass production.
It seamlessly incorporates the monster capture genre and expands upon it inside of the open-world survival crafting genre. It’s a combination of many things, some hilariously cry that it’s a ripoff except that it actually attempting to innovate the medium unlike Nintendo.
And now the game has managed to sell over two million copies in a single day, according to Pocket Pair via the official Palworld Twitter account.
But that’s not all, Palworld has managed to reach another milestone, three million sales in a 40 hour timeframe and shows no actual sign of slowing down anytime soon.
The game is immensely popular, at the time of writing the previous article related to this game, Palworld was maintaining over 400,000 concurrent players, swiping the top spot for popular titles on the Steam storefront alongside taking Twitch by storm.
And now?
Palworld’s popularity is quite literally snowballing, it’s very similar to the likes of Valheim and ARK Survival Evolved, both of which are notorious open-world survival crafting titles that have been stuck inside of early access hell for years with no general sign of actually releasing.
It is what it is, however Palworld has now managed to reach a substantially high concurrent player count of 855,706 a day following its early access release on the Steam store, for comparison to all time highs set by previously mentioned titles during the peaks of their popularity, ARK Survival Evolved only managed 248,405 concurrent players while Valheim managed 502,387 years ago.
Palworld has already demolished their records and is going a step further, it has now eclipsed the likes of Valve’s own DOTA 2 in terms of concurrent players throughout a 24 hour period, and it’s on the damn verge of beating out the all-time highs set by Baldur’s Gate 3, Hogwarts Legacy, Elden Ring and Cyberpunk 2077.
The game released just a couple of days ago, it is already positioned in tenth in regards to all-time peak concurrent player figures on Steam, it is an open-world crafting survival game that puts an emphasis on online play alongside the monster capture and exploitation element.
Unlike modern developed AAA dung the game is relatively cheap, currently available for $27 on Steam during the initial first week 10% sale, though of course you could save a couple of dollars if you bought the game from some sketchy key store.
I believe that this game will continue to grow and humiliate those big budget AAA titles produced by established developers and publishers, for such a small Japanese outfit as Pocket Pair, who previously developed Craftopia.
Palworld is a massive opportunity for them, this is their lightning in a bottle and I would be quite devastated if they turn into another western indie studio that seemingly becomes lazy after finding financial success.
Given that they are Japanese the success that they now find themselves in with Palworld would only propel them to greater heights, with frequent updates and additions flushing out the game for an eventual release over the next few years.
