Palworld lost two-thirds of its players in two weeks

While this is certainly not a “Palworld doomed post,” it’s worth noting what will unequivocally go down as one of the biggest surprise successes of 2024, even though it’s early in the year.

Palworld managed to hit the 2nd concurrent peak of all time on Steam with 2.1 million players. Very impressive and puts it above games like Dota 2 and CS:GO. However, despite the continued high output in the context, things are starting to decline quite rapidly.

That 2.1 million peak was about 15 days ago and now we see everything more closely to 750,000, during which time its peak has declined by about two-thirds. Still does enough to keep it at #2 on Steam, only behind CS2 and still duplicating another recent “hit” game like Helldivers 2 at 120-150K.

However, I am interested in how things look for Palworld in the long term. Was this a “craze” that would continue to lose players at a rapid rate? Or is it something that will really have legs and maybe not live A Pokemon competitor, at least something that could take some big bites out of a seemingly impenetrable franchise.

One thing I think is a bit of a problem with dropping so fast, it’s not just a one and done single player game. Its main advantage is live survival game, you can play on populated multiplayer servers. Even if not, this is a game with really long-term goals and hard work, from maxing out to building vast bases, perfecting your Paldeck, breeding and training powerful Pals that can take ages to fully form. But apparently 1.4 million or so players checked out what all the fuss was about and after a few days it died down.

Whatever happens now, Palworld will be a huge success. It should be noted that this is not a free game and all players paid $25-30 for their copy. That’s hundreds of millions of dollars headed to small developer Pocketpair, which is reportedly struggling a bit now, trying to meet its newfound need for scale.

I’m very interested to see if this decline will continue or stabilize with a longer, sustainable, healthy player population. Even accommodating a few hundred thousand regular players would be great. Falling below 100K in less than a month would be even less, and despite its initial, undeniable success, it probably doesn’t have legs. Either way I’ll watch it to make sure.

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