Palworld only launched yesterday in Early Access but already the demand for the ‘Pokémon with guns’ experience is high. Over one million copies of the game have been sold on Steam and Xbox Series X|S according to developer Pocketpair, and that’s not even including the game’s pickup rate on Game Pass for PC and Xbox.
“Palworld has sold over 1 million copies in about 8 hours since release! Thank you to everyone for playing!” reads the tweet from the Palworld X/Twitter account.
For those not familiar with Palworld, it is a title all about taking the monster-collecting genre charm and adding automation to it, assigning (exploiting) your ‘Pals’ tasks to create production pipelines for your benefit. Oh yeah, and you can make your Pals fight it out with guns and eat each other too within its open world.
This closeness to Pokémon however hasn’t come without its criticisms. Many have been calling the game and its inspirations a blatant ‘rip-off’ of the monster-collector giant, likening the designs of some of the Pals to those from Pokémon.
Still, the fandom and hype for Palworld continues, with the 1m player count affecting the reach of Xbox and PC Game Pass players as sessions only allow up to 2-4 player co-op while Steam can host dedicated servers for 32. The former’s issue is “not up to us,” says Pocketpair. Time will tell if this will see a change in the server allocation for Xbox Game Pass.
About the Author
Charlie Kelly
She/Her, They/Them
Charlie loves her video games as much as she loves dumb, charming JRPG protagonists: probably way too much. You can often catch her spending too much time being emotional over LGBT stories in games. She also thinks Yakuza 6 is the best one.
