“Palworld” lost two-thirds of its players in two weeks

While this is definitely not a “Palworld is doomed” post, it’s just something I think needs to be noted about what will undoubtedly go down as one of the biggest surprise hits of 2024, despite it being so early in the year.

Palworld managed to grab the #2 concurrent peak of all time on Steam with 2.1 million players. Extremely impressive and puts it ahead of games like Dota 2 and CS:GO. However, things start to go downhill pretty quickly, despite the continued high totals in the context.

That peak of 2.1 million was about 15 days ago, and now we see things closer to 750,000 instead, with its peaks falling by about two-thirds over that time period. That again is enough to keep it at #2 on Steam right now, behind only CS2, and still making multiples of another new “hit” game like Helldivers 2 at 120-150K.

However, I wonder how things look for Palworld in the long run. Was it just a “craze” that will continue to lose players sharply? Or is it something that will actually have legs and while maybe not a direct Rival Pokemon, 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 plummeting so quickly is that this isn’t just a single player game. The main game is as a live survival game that you can play on multiplayer servers. And even if not, this is a game with really, really long-term goals, from maxing out, building extensive bases, completing your Paldeck, crafting, and making powerful friends that can take ages to complete. fully formed. But it seems that around 1.4 million players checked out what all the fuss was about and got hooked after a few days.

Whatever happens now, Palworld will be considered a huge success. It’s important to keep in mind that this is not a free-to-play game, and all of these players shelled out $25-30 for their copy. That’s hundreds of millions of dollars headed to tiny developer Pocketpair, which is said to be choking a bit right now trying to keep up with new scaling needs.

I’m mostly curious as to whether this decline continues or stabilizes with a longer term, continuous, healthy player population. Accommodating even a few hundred thousand regular players would be great. Falling below 100K in less than a month would be less and shows that it probably has no legs, despite its initial, undeniable success. I’ll keep an eye on it just to be sure, just in case.

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