‘Palworld’ lost 84% of its players in a month (and that’s a good thing)

I’m pretty bummed to say that despite Palworld being good, it lost two-thirds of its playerbase in the first two weeks. But the key point was to figure out if Palworld would gain traction or just a flash in the pan, a huge spike in interest with a steep drop.

Now I thought I’d check back in 2-3 weeks for an update. Palworld currently peaks at around 350,000 concurrent players per night, which is 84% off on Steam 2.1 million from its peak. This is a good. If anything, I think it proves that the game has some staying power, given its continued performance.

It’s important to remember how crazy the 2.1 million parallel figure was in the first place. This is the second highest in Steam history by quite a significant margin, ahead of Dota, CSGO, Apex Legends, Lost Ark and more. So you would obviously expect a reduction from it. Even if Palworld is a survival game and doesn’t have a story to finish and long-term goals, it will never be able to maintain these numbers.

But relative to the rest of Steam, Palworld still performs very well. Topping out at 350,000 overnight means it’s ahead of pretty much everything but the “core” Steam games I just mentioned. It’s being replaced by new entries like Last Epoch and Helldivers 2, and those games work many well in its own right. But Palworld has not fallen to the bottom of the list and is still regularly in the top 5.

All of these are available on Xbox. Palworld has 15 million players on Steam and 10 million on Xbox because it’s available there through Game Pass. Since there are no microtransactions, there is no additional revenue beyond what Xbox pays in the first place. However, 15 million Steam copies sold for $30 is a good $450 million. In a month. For a team of several dozen relatively inexperienced people. Whatever happens from here, Palworld will absolutely be one of the biggest successes of the year.

Palworld’s latest updates are mostly focused on preventing cheaters, but Pocketpair says more Pals and gear are coming, along with PvE endgame raids and PvP battles. But we do not have a development schedule for this. Palworld is a “live” game, not live in the traditional sense with strict seasonal schedules or battle passes or microtransactions. At least not yet. We will see if they can resist.

I’m curious to see if Palworld can generate significant spikes in interest when new content is released, unless it’s a difficult season or expansion start like we’ve seen with other games. For now, the point is that it debuted so high that even steep drops in player count mean it still performs absurdly well in context.

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