In its recent Game Developer’s Conference panel, Palworld developer Pocketpair spoke about the success of its monster-catching survival crafting game. As caught by GamesRadar, Pocketpair communications director and publishing manager John Buckley spoke about the success Palworld was seeing even before its release.
For some context, Palworld, even before its release, was quite popular thanks to a handful of trailers that were released over the years. This led to the game being wishlisted on Steam quite a bit.
“The initial thinking for Palworld was that this was a game for a Japanese audience again,” said Buckley. “But we quickly got over a million wishlists within that first year, so we knew at that point that something was happening.”
“It kept going. 2023 was when things got really weird: we rose to number three on Steam wishlists […] and then we hit this crazy peak around November 2023. This peak never really stopped, it just kept going. People always ask us, ‘Why? What happened? How did you get so much attention?’ We don’t know. If we knew how to do it, we’d do it again, but we have no idea what happened.”
Buckley also spoke about Palworld‘s launch day, the immense number of sales it got, and the team’s celebration. The studio had to quickly get back to work after celebrating for 20 minutes, however, since the game’s launch was a rocky one, with quite a few server and network-related issues popping up for players.
“Not a lot of people know this, but most of our company at that time was a remote company,” Buckley said. “We had an office, but very few people went to the office. But everyone went on launch day. It was going to be a little celebration, a little bit of alcohol, a little bit of fun, and then go home. So we launched the game, went over to the vending machine, and started drinking. About 20 minutes later, our network engineer, our one network engineer, said the game has crashed. The Epic servers have crashed. That’s when things started to get weird.”
Ultimately, Palworld proved to incredibly successful. For context, the game had managed to sell more than 7 million copies in its first five days alone. Very quickly, the studio reported 8 million sales in six days. Back in February, Palworld apparently had more than 32 million players across all of the platforms where the title is available. Buckley referred to these sales figures “disgusting”.
“Within that first week, we hit this disgusting number that makes me feel sick when I see it,” he added. “And this was basically split over Steam and Xbox, which were our two platforms at that time. Again, 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. It really was unbelievable, and just seeing this today still kind of freaks me out. We finished off the month with 25 million players, that was 30 days post-release, and this was kind of the last time we ever publicly spoke about player numbers. There’s a few reasons for this, but basically the short version is that there were some bad vibes coming, and these bad vibes convinced us to stop marketing for a while and go a little bit quiet.”
Palworld is available on PC, Xbox One, Xbox Series X/S and PS5. Check out our review for more details.
