When Palworld launched on January 19, it quickly skyrocketed to be one of the most popular games ever released on Steam as the second-most-played game ever with over 2.1 million players. Just over two months later, however, that player base has fallen.
According to SteamDB, Palworld has lost 97% of its peak player count on Steam. In fact, since the beginning of March, when player counts were still hovering around 275,000 daily players, the game has consistently lost thousands of players per day down to a recent 24-hour peak of just 69,850 as of writing.
While that number is startling, it shouldn’t be shocking or unexpected right now. It also shouldn’t be taken as a sign that the game is starting to fail.
The game reached peaks rarely ever seen. It was expected that the game’s player count was going to fall after the initial hype surrounding it faded, and that’s exactly what happened. On top of that, Palworld isn’t a live service game that have become commonplace through the industry. That means players don’t need to make sure they login every single day to complete their daily challenges or risk missing out on some sort of reward.
It also should be mentioned that developer Pocketpair isn’t abandoning the game. In fact, the team has already released a full roadmap of what they plan to bring to the game during early access. These updates will include new features like PvP, Raid Bosses, a Pal Arena, crossplay between Steam and Xbox players, new Pals, and plenty more.
As more updates are released, it should be expected that players will continue to come back to Palworld or try it for the first time. It then becomes a question of when the player base will rebound, not if.
What do you think of Palworld losing 97% of its players on Steam since launch? For more Insider Gaming, check out the latest on the Silent Hill 2 Remake possibly coming soon.
The game is dead. Unless they have some Hail Mary to revive the game otherwise dead.
In what world does 65k players this long after launch for a non-live service games mean its dead? Lol it’s still #24 on Streams most played game. Come back to reality, sir.
Wow. Almost like this happens to literally every game, even live service ones. You could say the exact same thing for elden ring, a month after it came out. It’s as of people get all they can out of the game, then move on. What a stupid article trying to be a hit piece.
This game is not a live service game. Players left because they beat the game and are waiting for more content to be added.
I agree with Popla. They’re working too slow. They’d need constant updates at this point to keep it going. They talked about adding a raid boss almost a month ago and still no update. Plus, it’s a pointless update as the servers aren’t even good. I’d like to be proven wrong but, as Popla said, It’s dead. This is going from a guy that just beat it on hard and is bored as hell with it. I won’t be coming back unless it becomes an MMO or something with good multiplayer. I don’t see that happening for a long time if ever. Plus, they got SO many things wrong. It’s a chopped up mess that only sold millions because of it’s pokemon similarly. But, as soon as people realized it’s design was a hot mess, they abounded it. Never to return. It’d take a miracle.
Players stop playing until new content is added on an early access game.
Stop the shitty bait articles.
If the game didn’t always crash. Or actually let players go into caves without crashing. I believe there would be less of a drop in players.