January 21, 2024 – Palworld has now overtaken Cyberpunk 2077’s peak player count. Story continues below.
Palworld is big right now. Very big. So big, in fact, that the survival crafting game packed with Pokémon style Pals has just crested an astonishing milestone on Steam that even the might of the all-conquering Elden Ring couldn’t manage, and it might well be on its way to even greater heights. Despite being available through Microsoft’s PC Game Pass, the multiplayer monster-collecting game is topping Valve’s Steam charts left and right, and it’s only early days.
You’ve probably seen Palworld by now, because the open-world survival game is absolutely everywhere. Along with taking over Steam, the adorable Palworld Pals, many of whom bear more than a passing resemblance to some of our favorite pocket monsters, can be seen splashed across all of Twitch and YouTube.
In a post on social media site X (formerly Twitter), developer Pocketpair celebrates the news that Palworld Steam users have topped one million concurrent players. That’s an astonishing feat, and one that eclipses even FromSoftware’s mighty RPG Elden Ring, which fell just short of the milestone with an all-time peak player count of 953,426.
Not only that, it brings Palworld just shy of the 1,054,388 lifetime peak hit by Cyberpunk 2077. With the new game still very much on the upswing, it’s quite possible we’ll see it eclipse even that total, which would make it the highest peak ever attained by a paid-for game on Steam. The only other games above that are Dota 2, Lost Ark, Counter-Strike 2, and PUBG Battlegrounds, all of which are available as free-to-play games.
Not only that, Palworld also tops the Steam top sellers chart by revenue, putting it ahead of Valve’s own Steam Deck globally and in the United States, and ahead of the likes of CS2, Baldur’s Gate 3, and EA Sports FC 24. That’s a lot of people wondering if Pals evolve in Palworld, and doubly impressive given the game’s inclusion on Game Pass. “We are so glad you enjoy the game,” Pocketpair writes via X.
Update – Sunday January 21: Palworld has now officially topped Cyberpunk 2077’s record, with a peak player count of 1,183,921 at the time of writing. This makes it the most-played paid-for game ever on Steam by concurrent users. Definitely quite the feat – and who knows how much higher it could climb?
The game’s meteoric rise came as such a surprise that Palworld held an emergency meeting with Epic Games to help handle issues with Palworld multiplayer connectivity. Even private Palworld server companies are running short on server capacity due to the high demand.
Fortunately, the good news is that you can set up your own Palworld dedicated server if you want to. Just be careful if you’re playing right now, because there’s currently a troublesome Palworld memory wiping bug that can leave you completely unable to progress.
In the meantime, we’ve got the lowdown on where to get Palworld Wheat Seeds, along with how you can move base in Palworld, if you’ve got your eye set on a particular part of the Palworld map.
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