Palworld has achieved more players in 2 months than Elden Ring and Hogwarts Legacy managed in a year
Just one month after launch, Pocketpair says Palworld (or, as we've called it, "the Pokémon this sinful world deserves") has now surpassed 25 million players across Steam and Xbox.
Palworld isn't flying quite as high as it was in January, when it became just the second game in the history of Steam—behind PUBG—to rack up more than two million concurrent players. The peak concurrent player count over the last 24 hours is 344,577, according to Steam Charts, a significant dropoff but, let's be honest, still the kind of number that most developers would kill for (and one that Pocketpair doesn't seem too worried about). It remains firmly ensconced near the top of Steam's most-played games chart, currently wedged between PUBG and the surging action RPG Last Epoch.
To put that number in perspective, Hogwarts Legacy—one of the biggest games of 2023—took roughly three months to achieve 15 million sales across all platforms, a number that eventually grew to 22 million by the end of 2023, while Elden Ring—one of the biggest games of 2022—moved more than 20 million copies in just under a year. It's not an apples-to-apples comparison and the math is admittedly rough, but it really illustrates that Palworld is absolutely massive by any measure.
25 million players does not necessarily equate to 25 million sales. Palworld has been on Game Pass from the day it came out and it did gangbusters numbers there, becoming the biggest third-party launch in the history of Microsoft's subscription service. But the bulk of that number—15 million—comes from Steam, and on Steam, as my dear departed granddad used to say, «If you wanna play, you gotta pay.»
And people are definitely paying. To update the very back-of-napkin calculations we did earlier this month when Pocketpair announced it was sinking nearly $500,000 every month into keeping the Palworld servers up "no matter what," 15 million sales on Steam at $30 each works out to (faint adding machine noises) $450,000,000. Shave 30% off that
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