Palworld is slowing down, with only a third of its players remaining three weeks after release

It seems like Palworld is finally reaching some stability, even if at first glance this sounds like bad news. The unexpected massive success of PocketPair’s survival monster catching game is finally beginning to slow down on PC, Xbox One, and Xbox Series X|S. And while many would have you believe that its player count is bleeding dangerously, the game is still doing great.

At the moment of writing, it’s been almost a month since the release of Palworld and its incredible numbers both in sales and concurrent players, even when the title was released in Early Access. As such with limited content in the game and the initial popularity boost reaches its limit, players have started to drift away.

Palworld’s massive success is settling down (but it’s still killing it)

When you take a look at visual aids like graphs and timelines, it might seem like a worrying trend that Palworld on Steam has lost about two-thirds of its all-time peak of concurrent players. But actually take a look at the numbers and…

With a peak of 2,101,867 concurrent players, that count has been lowered to “only” 415,765 at the moment. This data comes straight from SteamDB, so it’s updated in almost real time, and as you can see it also shows that the 24-hour peak is of 610,050 players. These numbers place it firmly among the top 3 most played games on Steam, coming back down from its massive hype with only Counter-Strike 2 and DOTA 2 above it and over 300K players more than Apex Legends.

Meanwhile, TrueAchievements reported that the Microsoft version (which is on both PC Game Pass and Xbox consoles) has so far lost 41% of its players since launch. Unfortunately, no specific numbers were given, but last we heard from PocketPair themselves there were over 7 million players on that edition of the game, which means it’s still doing pretty well.

So is this loss of players a cause for concern? We wouldn’t bet on it. Taking into account what was previously mentioned (Palworld being an Early Access title), let’s not forget that novelty in the industry is obviously very temporal. But that doesn’t mean that the game and its company is doomed.

For starters, this is not a live service game. It is an experience that has limited content, meant to be played in single and multiplayer co-op. It also comes at the cost of a single purchase to play for as long as the game exists in your platform, with no subscriptions necessary to get the upcoming content.

Shortly after launch the developers announced a roadmap of what they plan to add to the game in future updates, including PvP, raids, and Pal-fights. And even though the CEO of the studio joked about the extremely high costs of maintaining the game’s servers operational, with a lower count of players those costs will also be lowered.

Finally, one thing that is often ignored in this kind of warnings about games “dying” or “being abandoned” is that when a title is built to be enjoyed with a clear end to its content, there is no need to stay logged on. Once they’ve seen all there is, players will move on to other games, and their return is hoped for once the title is updated with additional stuff to do and see.