While speaking on a panel at GDC, Pocketpair’s John Buckley, who leads the Pocketpair Publishing arm of the firm, took a deep dive into the rampant and overwhelming success of Palworld. In January 2024, Palworld – which was dubbed ‘Pokémon with guns’ – was released to the open market, going on to secure 25 million players in a single month.
To this day, Pocketpair still has no idea how or why Palworld was such a roaring success, as Buckley revealed at GDC.
‘Things Started To Get Weird’
On the panel at the Game Developer’s Conference, John ‘Bucky’ Buckley reeled off his impression of the release of Palworld, which took place a little more than a year ago:
We quickly go over a million wishlists within the first year, so we knew that something was happening, and it kept going.
2023 was when things got really weird – we rose to number three on Steam wishlists, then we hit a crazy peak around November 2023. People always ask us, ‘Why? What happened? How did you get so much attention?’ But we don’t know. If we knew how to do it, we’d do it again, but we have no idea what happened.
Within this first week, we hit this disgusting number that makes me feel sick when I see it.
Why did we get this many players? I don’t know, please don’t ask me. I know someone will ask me after, but I promise you we don’t know the answer.
(thanks to GamesRadar for the quote)
Palworld became one of the best-selling games in history, shattering player count records and skyrocketing up the charts on social and streaming platforms worldwide. It was an overnight sensation, and it became the talk of the town mere hours after hitting the market.
Pocketpair could barely handle the weight – and Epic Games struggled as well. The popularity of the game brought servers offline, struggling under the stress of the sheer volume of people trying to play the game.
While the player count has understandably petered off by now, Palworld remains a popular title that’s being updated by Pocketpair all the time. It wasn’t exactly a flash in the pan.
It’s tough to understand exactly why Palworld was such a success. Perhaps it’s the disbelief that it was ‘allowed’ to exist or the sheer inanity of the concept that pulled players in. Pocketpair doesn’t know, and I don’t know either.
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