The Palworld bubble is deflating. The survival game developed by Japanese studio Pocketpair has lost 84 percent of its concurrent users in its first month on sale. If at the end of January it reached the surprising number of 2,101,867 simultaneous players in its PC version, in the last twenty-four hours its peak number of players has been 339,873 players. It is still an extraordinarily high number, but it is a far cry from the phenomenon it was during its early days.
The American media Forbes reports the surprising drop in users, although it also points out how unusual it has been for Palworld – a title accused of being a plagiarism of Pokémon, Ark: Survival Evolved and other games – to have reached such figures. In fact, its responsible studio announced just a few days ago that the title has already been played by 25 million people (15 million on Steam and 10 million on Xbox).
At the time of writing, Palworld is the sixth most played title on the PC gaming platform Steam when taking into account the number of users in the last 24 hours. The title developed by PocketPair has been surpassed by Apex Legends, Helldivers 2 – which is the new sensation of the moment –, PUBG: Battlegrounds, Dota 2 and Counter-Strike 2.
Obviously, the number of concurrent Steam users does not include users of Xbox, Microsoft's video game platform. It would be interesting to know that information, since the title is included in the Game Pass on-demand game service and hence its success in this ecosystem.
Despite the drop in the number of users, there is no doubt that Palworld is one of the greatest successes in the history of electronic entertainment. Only taking into account the 15 million units sold on Steam, where it costs 29 euros, the game has already amassed 435 million euros. An astronomical figure for a small studio and which does not contemplate what Microsoft has paid the studio to include it in the Game Pass catalog.
The Tokyo-based studio has committed to continuing to update the game, since it is still in early access and not in its final form. Meanwhile, The Pokémon Company issued a statement at the end of last January in which they assured that they will investigate the accusations of plagiarism in Palworld.
