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.
