Palworld's peak player count is the 7th highest for any Steam game ever.

Palworld released on Friday, January 19th and already it's hit some incredibly impressive milestones. Released for Xbox Series X|S, Xbox One, Game Pass, and PC, this "Pokemon with guns" game seems poised to either take the world by storm or be one incredible flash in the pan hit.

While we don't know the exact player counts and sales figures for Xbox and Game Pass, we do know that Palworld quickly rose the Steam charts in the past day. In its first 24 hours, Palworld saw a peak concurrent player count of 855,425. This places it at the eigth position on Steam's all-time peak concurrent player chart, surpassing Cyberpunk 2077's peak of 830,387 set in December 2020. It's also only about 20,000 behind Baldur's Gate 3's peak CCU.

The game rose in popularity so fast that Pocketpair had to have an emergency meeting with Epic Games in order to alleviate issues with the online multiplayer. Palworld looks to use the Epic Games backend for some online connectivity stuff. Apparently, the Epic Games backend defaults to a soft cap of 700,000 concurrent players. This caused issues for many players yesterday before Pocketpair and Epic Games got it sorted out, presumably raising

Perhaps just as interesting is the word that Palworld has sold over 2 million copies in under a day. The game's developer, Pocketpair, took to Twitter to reveal the news to the world.


Prior to the 2 million milestone announcement, Pocketpair had revealed that Palworld sold over 1 million copies in the game's first eight hours of availability. Though not 100% clear, the "copies sold" milestones announced by Pocketpair probably do not include Game Pass subscribers that are playing the game.

It's not all rainbows and sunshine though. Those playing the Xbox, Windows Store version, or Game Pass (Xbox and PC) versions of Palworld are playing a much older version of the game than what is available through Steam. For instance, the Steam release allows for up to 32 players to play together in one instance, but the Xbox and PC Game Pass versions only allow for four players. Several menus are also vastly different between Steam and the other versions. There are also several bugs and issues not present (or that are far less severe) in the Steam release that have not yet been implemented into the Xbox, Windows Store, and Game Pass builds of the game.

Palworld released as an Early Access title on January 19th. It's priced at $29.99 normally but there is a discount if you purchase during this launch window. Also, the whole "Pokemon with guns" thing is a little misleading. Palworld is more like Ark but with Pokemon style creatures instead of dinosaurs. There is quite a bit of survival and base building, which are things that are not really a part of Pokemon. Oh, and you can also capture humans and sell off their parts.

Small update at 10PM (ET) on January 20: They just surpassed 3 million copies sold.