Palworld dev unfazed by talk of declining player counts

Palworld devs aren’t concerned about the current dropoff in players at all. Their focus is on delivering new content.

Palworld’s phenomenal launch has solidified the title as one of the most statistically popular games of all time. Pocketpair’s survival-oriented creature-collecter rocketed through the Steam charts hitting concurrent player counts of over 2 million Pal Tamers.

The most recently available sales figures reveal that over 19 million people installed the game across Xbox and PC. Not even Palworld’s developers anticipated its explosive popularity.

Palworld’s community manager Bucky noted as much in a recent post on X celebrating Palworld’s success almost a month on from its launch. In that same post, they shrugged off reports of a fall-off in concurrent players.

With Palworld quickly approaching the 1-month mark, it's interesting to look back at my own thoughts for launch.

In May of 2023, I was convinced that Palworld could break the 50,000 player mark. Anything above that seemed unobtainable though, and I certainly never expected it to… pic.twitter.com/1rZaV30QON

— Bucky | Palworld & Craftopia (@Bucky_cm) February 14, 2024

Bucky began the post by revealing their initial expectations for Palworld ahead of its launch. Those expectations were met and then exceeded beyond any imagining.

“In May of 2023, I was convinced that Palworld could break the 50,000 player mark,” they explained. “Anything above that seemed unobtainable though, and I certainly never expected it to reach into the millions.”

Despite that, recent discussion of Palworld has focused on those millions of players moving on from the game and Bucky isn’t having it. This emerging ‘Palworld has lost X% of its player base’ discourse is lazy,” they said. “It is fine to take breaks from games.”

Bucky qualified that some drop-off was expected because Palworld’s development team isn’t equipped to frequently update the game with new content. Of course, that doesn’t mean that more content isn’t coming.

There’s some understandable confusion around this shift in tone for Palworld discussion. Especially considering the game still achieves daily peaks of over half a million players on Steam alone.

Though clearly, the team behind the game isn’t too perturbed. “If you are still playing Palworld, we love you,” Bucky assured players. “If you’re no longer playing Palworld, we still love you, and we hope you’ll come back for round 2 when you’re ready.”