While this is certainly not a “Palworld is doomed post,” it is just something I think should be noted about what will unequivocally go down as one of the biggest surprise successes of 2024, despite it being this early into the year.
Palworld managed to snag the #2 concurrent peak of all time on Steam at 2.1 million players. Enormously impressive, and putting it ahead of games like Dota 2 and CS:GO. However, things are starting to drop off rather quickly, despite continued high totals in context.
That 2.1 million peak was about 15 days ago, and now we are seeing things closer to 750,000 instead, with its peaks down around two-thirds over that period of time. Again, that is enough to keep it at the #2 spot on Steam right now, behind only CS2, and still doing multiples of another new “hit” game like Helldivers 2 at 120-150K.
I do wonder about what things look like for Palworld in the long term, however. Was it just a “craze” that will keep losing players precipitously? Or is it something that will indeed have legs and while maybe not be a direct Pokemon rival, something that can at least take some big bites out of the seemingly impenetrable franchise.
One thing that I think is a bit of a problem with this steep a drop this quickly is that this is not just a one-and-done single player game. The main draw of it is as a live survival game you can play on populated multiplayer servers. And even if not, this is a game with really, really long terms goals and grinds, from reaching max level, to building sprawling bases, to completing your Paldeck, to breeding and farming up powerful Pals which can take eons to fully form. But it looks like 1.4 million or so players checked out what all the fuss was about and dipped after a couple of days.
No matter what happens now, Palworld will be considered a massive success. It’s important to keep in mind that this is not a free-to-play game, and all those players shelled out $25-30 for their copy. This is hundreds of millions of dollars heading to tiny developer Pocketpair, which is reportedly drowning a bit now trying to keep up with their newfound scaling needs.
I am just mostly curious as to whether this drop off continues, or whether it stabilizes with a longer term, ongoing, healthy player population. Settling at even a few hundred thousand regular players would be great. Plunging down to under 100K in under a month would be less so, and indicate it probably does not have legs, despite its initial, undeniable success. I’ll keep an eye on it to be sure, either way.
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