‘Palworld’ Has Lost 84% Of Its Players In A Month (And That’s Fine)

I got a lot of flak for saying that Palworld had lost two thirds of its playerbase in its first two weeks, despite that being well, a factual statement. But the main point was figuring out whether or not Palworld would have staying power, or if it would just be a flash in the pan, a huge surge in interest with a steep dropoff.

Now, I figured I’d check in 2-3 weeks later for an update. Palworld is currently peaking at around 350,000 concurrent players a night, and that’s down 84% on Steam from its peak of 2.1 million. This is…fine. If anything, I think this does in fact prove the game has some measure of staying power given its continued performance.

It is important to remember just how insane the 2.1 million concurrent number was in the first place. That is the second highest in Steam history by a fairly significant margin, ahead of the likes of Dota, CSGO, Apex Legends, Lost Ark and many more. So you are obviously going to expect a drop from that. Even if Palworld is a survival game and does not have a story to finish and does have long-term objectives, it was never going to sustain those figures.

But relative to the rest of Steam, Palworld is still performing very well. Peaking at 350,000 or so a night means it’s above almost everything but the “core” Steam games now, the ones I just mentioned. It swaps in and out with new entries like Last Epoch and Helldivers 2, and those games are doing very well in their own right. But Palworld has not sunk to the bottom of the list, and is routinely still inside the top 5.

There’s also the Xbox of it all. Palworld has 15 million players on Steam and 10 million players on Xbox, as it’s available there through Game Pass. There’s no additional revenue there though past what Xbox paid in the first place, because there are no microtransactions. However, 15 million Steam copies sold at $30 a piece is well, $450 million. In a month. For a team made up of a few dozen relatively inexperienced people. No matter what happens from here, Palworld is absolutely going to be one of the biggest successes of the year.

The latest updates to Palworld have been mainly focused on stamping out cheaters, but Pocketpair has said that more Pals and gear are coming, along with PvE endgame raids and PvP fights. But we don’t have a development timeline on that. Palworld is a “live” game without being live in the traditional sense with strict seasonal timelines or battle passes or microtransactions. At least not yet. We’ll see if they can resist.

I am curious to see if Palworld can create significant surges in interest when new content is rolled out if it’s not a hard season or expansion launch like we see with other games. For now though, the point is that it debuted so, so high that even sharp drops in playercounts mean that it’s still performing absurdly well in context.

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