Palworld Dev Recalls the Panic Situation When Players Count Kept Soaring at Launch

It’s been almost a year since Palworld, the hit survival-crafting game developed by Pocketpair, was launched in January 2024 and sold over 19 million copies within the first two weeks of its launch. And the news following its release was no stranger to us - the game quickly became viral, attracting a whopping 2.1 million concurrent players on Steam, which was definitely beyond the expectation of the team. 

A year after the launch, John "Bucky" Buckley, the game's global community manager, recalled the panic situation they had faced in an interview with Polygon. As the player count began to soar, "that’s when a couple of the developers had to go back to their desks because things started to get a bit shaky," he recalled. 

Yet no one knew when the peak was, and the number kept increasing like losing control. "Throughout the night it kept going. And there was a point, definitely after midnight because a few of us had gone home who lived far away, that the servers broke. That was around a million." Speaking of the struggling server, there was only one team member responsible for overseeing the servers at that time. "He was trying his best," Buckley said. 

Other than this poor server guy, the rest of the team was in a similar dire situation. "We definitely panicked more than we should have. Didn’t need to pull as many all-nighters as we did."

Ever since its stunning release, the player’s base kept shrinking; Palworld lost 2/3 of its players not long afterward, leading some to label it a "dead game." Yet Buckley believed that it wasn't necessarily a bad thing as some games were not designed to keep players engaged "every single day for months on end."

Last December, Palworld received the Feybreak update, which brought it a new wave of popularity. The number of the game's 24-hour peak of concurrent players rose to its highest since its release at the beginning of the year, surpassing 200,000. 

Besides bringing in new content to the game, Pocketpair also released a minor update, which changed the way players summon owned Pals by throwing Pal Spheres — the mechanic that has been considered a patent infringement of Pokémon by Nintendo, who initiated a lawsuit against the developer.