Today Palworld developer Pocketpair announced another milestone of sales and players for its super-popular survival crafting game.
As announced on the game's official Discord server, it has reached 25 million players in a month, including 15 million copies sold on Steam and 10 million players on Xbox.
That's a massive milestone, and it pretty much matches the success of Nintendo's own Pokemon Scarlet and Violet, which shipped 24.36 million copies as of December 31, 2023.
I'm sure we'll see headlines mentioning that Palworld has "beaten" Pokemon, but we have to be a little more conservative here as we aren't comparing apples to apples. Pokemon Scarlet and Violet's numbers are as of December 31, which means that the game has likely picked up another million shipments or so since.
We're also talking about shipments of a platform-exclusive game compared to sales on digital-only platforms added to people playing thanks to Xbox and PC Game Pass.
That being said, while I'd be careful before calling winners and losers, I'd say it's very safe to say that Pocketpair's game has at least matched Pokemon Scarlet and Violet's success. Unless its sales start dipping radically, it might leave its distant cousin behind going forward, especially considering that Palworld's numbers were achieved in a single month, while Pokemon accrued them in over a year.
Pokemon Scarlet and Violet shipped 20.61 million copies in a month and a half, with an estimated 18.2 million sold-through to customers. We can pretty much say that the two games are neck-and-neck in terms of their overall success.
We have seen certain media sources pushing the narrative that Palworld's daily peak players have dipped since its launch, alleging that its success may be waning, but that's quite misleading. As the novelty wears out and new games are released, people naturally play less. Dips (even very large) in peak users are the norm, not the exception.
Palworld still achieves daily peaks of around 350,000 players on Steam (according to the monitoring site SteamDB) which is very flattering for a game that's a month old. Right now, roughly 333,000 people are playing on Steam alone. These aren't numbers one can associate with a passing fad, even not counting that they're on only one platform.
In the meanwhile, the developers have promised to continue focusing on "fixing bugs and preventing further cheating." We know that they have an extensive roadmap for additional content and features planned for the game's early access, but we'll likely have to wait for the main issues to be ironed out before Poketpair starts working mainly on that.
If you're wondering why the game is so successful, you can read our hands-on preview, which will provide you with quite a lot of info on its pros and cons, and give you an idea of whether Palworld is for you or not in its current state.
If you'd like to play the game with your friends and without having to deal with cheaters (unless you have bad friends, I suppose) you can rent a private server on SurvivalServers.
Note: TechRaptor participates in an Affiliate Partnership with SurvivalServers.
