Now that 2024 is halfway over, it’s clear that Pocket Pair’s Palworld is undeniably the biggest title released so far this year, with over twenty million copies sold in just a short time since its release on January 19.
Palworld, the earnest indie game from the Japanese studio, quickly rose to prominence and took the gaming industry by storm. While it has been a feel-good moment for the small indie team, it has also faced immense criticism from Nintendo loyalists who have demonized the game’s creature companion mechanics, likening it to a Pokémon clone, despite Palworld being an open-world survival crafting game.
A reviewer from Eurogamer, a massive Pokémon fan, gave Palworld a less-than-stellar conflict-free review, while Dead by Daylight’s chief of staff called the game boring and repetitive. IGN also tried to twist the knife by distorting the words made by PocketPair’s CEO in regards to Chinese games emulating Palworld in terms of design characteristics, like Azur Promilia for instance.
Despite these claims, Palworld shocked the world with its rapid sales milestones and cemented itself as Steam’s second most-played game concurrently, with 2.1 million simultaneous players, surpassing popular free-to-play titles like Counter-Strike 2 and Dota 2.
However, the higher they fly, the further they fall as they say, as a live service game released in early access, Palworld was far from being fully developed. Nevertheless, gamers tend to play a game until they’ve completed it or exhausted its content before moving on to something else, a decline in player counts post release is to be expected.
Journalists are happy to report when a particular game has dropped around 90% percent of its peak concurrent players however this never tells the entire story. Palworld peaked at over 2,101,000 players on PC alone and its continued player retention had been quite successful given how the game was still tracking over 100,000 peak concurrent players by the end of March.
However since the end of April the games playerbase had “dwindled” in a sense, down to around 40,000 – 20,000 players from May onwards.
You might look at such a figure and think to yourself that Palworld is “dead” or is forgotten history but you’d be wrong, it’s a live service game, one that’s in early access.
Despite having been released half a year ago the game itself still managed to retain tens of thousands of players, all things considered this is still quite lucrative for a game of its nature compared to over live service titles like Suicide Squad: Kill The Justice League that never even managed to hit the ground running.
For Rocksteady’s game to lose majority of its player count which would mean a decline of 12,000 players down to a mere hundred, Suicide Squad not only sold poorly to start with but outright failed to retain players outright, the same cannot be said in comparison to Palworld.
A recent update for Palworld introduced a new island called Sakurajima, along with additional Pals, enemies, and items. This is the largest update the game has received, revitalizing player interest and debunking claims that the game was dead or forgotten. As a result, there has been a significant increase in the player count on Steam.
As a live service game, it’s crucial that new content is added regularly to maintain the games playerbase over time Regular updates and new content keep players engaged and invested in the experience, ensuring longevity and success. While the games player counts are a far cry from their record breaking highs, the game had gone from around 20,000 players to well over 100,000.
Comparing the concurrent peaks, we see a dramatic increase from 29,128 players on June 25th to over 143,000 players today, marking a 392.2% surge in concurrent players following Palworld’s Sakurajima update.
In comparison, another live service game that captured gamers’ attention this year was Sony’s Helldivers 2. It peaked at over 458,000 concurrent players on Steam and was praised for its politically neutral stance and engaging gameplay. However, controversy struck when Sony attempted to force PC players to create and link a PlayStation Network account with their Steam accounts to continue playing.
Sony eventually backed down after Helldivers 2 was hit with hundreds of thousands of negative reviews, despite this Helldivers 2 remains unavailable for sale in 177 countries contributing to its decline.
This incident, combined with the game’s official Discord becoming a politicized hugbox with progressive moderators banning users for negative reactions to their furry artwork, led to a rapid decline in the game’s popularity, I for one am glad I decided against purchasing the game after its community manager bitched about how Helldivers 2 was “woke.”
While 40,000 concurrent players is still solid, it’s a far cry from the nearly 120,000 the game managed before Sony’s attempted account linkage. The player base has declined rapidly even after Sony reluctantly reversed their decision.
I’m glad to see Palworld regaining its audience as its developers remain dedicated to its ongoing development. Unfortunately, the same can’t be said for other games in the open-world survival crafting genre.
For example, 7 Days to Die has drastically slowed down its update frequency in recent years, moving out of early access a decade after release, with The Fun Pimps seemingly needing a few more years to integrate the game with Steam’s workshop community mods, highlighting their laziness.
Meanwhile, the developers behind ARK: Survival Evolved opted to resell the game, which has always been criticized for poor optimization and bugs on PC. The new version, “ARK: Survival Ascended,” built on the UE5 engine, performs even worse and is more broken than before, now featuring paid curated mods.
It’s also speculated that PocketPair will be releasing Palworld on Sony’s PlayStation 5 soon, following a tease from the game’s community manager on Twitter.
Considering the game launched on PC and Xbox platforms as part of Microsoft’s Game Pass, a PlayStation release would likely lead to a resurgence in the game’s popularity, especially among those who chose to buy the censorship ladled blue console over a PC.
