Palworld might be a flash in the pan as games go, but it’s a flash that’s burning with the strength of a billion suns at the moment. In the two days since Palworld was released, it has taken the world by storm, soaring on Steam to more than two million players and a peak concurrency of 844,145, which pushes it into the top ten all-time most-played games.
It has been such a staggering success in the short term that it prompted an emergency response from Epic Games and the developer of Palword, Pocketpair. Reportedly, an emergency meeting was held to troubleshoot an issue brought on by the swarm of players flooding Palworld, eager to experience what is one of the most successful meme games ever.
UPDATE – Epic Games has told Insider Gaming that Palworld ‘hit a preconfigured limit on the backend’ and the issue has now been resolved.
Pokémon With Guns? Sure!
At first blush, you’d be forgiven for thinking Palword is a Pokémon game – and then you’ll see the guns and strange, violent elements. When Palworld was first revealed, the world had no way of believing it would ever make it to market, given the similarities the game bears to Nintendo’s legendary monster-catching franchise.
Currently, Palworld is beating out almost every game on Steam. It sits just 200,000 players behind Counter-Strike 2, which is consistently the most popular game on the PC platform. It is smashing down the likes of Dota 2, PUBG, GTA V, Apex Legends, and Baldur’s Gate 3.
What’s even more surprising is that Palworld isn’t a free-to-play game. These are the titles that normally dominate because of the lack of ‘entry requirements. Players are more than open to paying top dollar for this bizarre open-world survival game simply to experience the inanity of it.
Seriously, it’s borderline strange at times. There are opportunities for players to capture these cute creatures and then put them to work in slave labour camps and equip them with assault rifles to fight to the death against all manner of opponents.
It’s different and it doesn’t take itself seriously – that’s why it’s doing so well.
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Meme game? It’s a solid survival game. PEOPLE LOVE survival crafting games. The market just rarely releases them.
Hell, New World was designed as one, and had several alphas that played more like ARK (with player made building), but people didn’t like that it was so PVP heavy and they stripped it all out for beta.
It’s less that survival crafting games are never released, it’s more that they are often generic and filled with tedious systems for the sake of being unique or challenging. PalWorld, like a few others in the past, has everything in terms of survival just right, and the ‘pokemon’ style aspects etc to keep it unique and fun.
I’ve never tried playing a survival game before this, but I can’t put this down. Seriously, I’ll play it on the Series X, then grab my controller and tablet and take it with me to play while taking care of other business. It’s won my attention away from Sonic Frontier, Ghostwire Toyko, and Persona 5 Royal, all of which I had been rotating between before Palworld.
currently rank 1 on steam even above counter strike 2. and this article is a bit misleading. its not a meme game. the crafting,survival,catching mechanics work rly well with a lot of qol things which other games like ark etc. dont even have after years of patches
Microsoft needs to buy them and give them the support they need this game could have been a huge win for them if it didn’t have issues on Xbox