Palworld, affectionately known as "Pokemon with Guns," has officially launched into Early Access today, taking PC and Xbox by storm.
The open-world survival game, sees players collect legally-safe monsters, or "Pals," and either befriend them or use them as just cogs in the machinations to automate base building. It's satire on the whole creature-collecting genre, and at times it looks like it can be pretty dark at that.
However, it seems this is exactly what fans of the genre have been jonesing for, as Palworld has zoomed up the Steam charts since its launch this morning. In eight hours, developer Pocketpair claims to have sold over a million copies. Steam is just one platform, as Palworld was also released on the Windows store, Xbox Series S|X, and is available today on Game Pass as well.
Palworld has sold over 1 million copies in about 8 hours since release! Thank you to everyone for playing!#Pocketpair #Palworld pic.twitter.com/HbllMotIJr
— Palworld (@Palworld_EN) January 19, 2024
Over on Steam, the game is rocketing up the charts, with over 370K concurrent players at its peak today as of the time of this writing. Given that it's the weekend's start, we could see that number grow even higher as people get off work and try their hand at this zany take on the creature-collecting genre. It's also at the top of the Top Selling list today on Steam, as well as the third most-played game right now on the platform, just behind Counter-Strike 2 and DOTA 2.
It should be noted that there are some pretty key differences between the Steam and Xbox versions, namely with how many players a session will support. While Steam players benefit from dedicated servers that allow up to 32 players at a time, Xbox (and even Xbox Game Pass on PC players) are limited to just a max of four players. Not sure why this limit is in place and whether it is a platform limitation (it shouldn't be) or whether Microsoft isn't allowing dedicated servers at this time, but buyer beware.
Hello everyone,We are blown away with the response to Palworld and we're doing our best to respond to your issues!Currently, our server provider is reporting that due to the large amount of concurrent players, the servers have become unstable and you may be experiencing…
— Palworld (@Palworld_EN) January 19, 2024
The servers are also getting crushed under the weight of the launch, with the devs suggesting players wait a few minutes after launching Palworld to connect. Pocketpair also suggests attempting to connect a few times, as they've seen reports of this working for some players.
Either way, the game that just a few days ago assured players it was, in fact, not a scam surely doesn't seem to be feeling any hangover that usually comes with an announcement like that.
Are you checking out Palworld today? Let us know what you think in the comments. We're starting our review of the survival game and will report back here with our findings next week in our review in progress.
