Palworld Releases to Explosive Popularity and Tops Steam’s Most Played List

Palworld has been hailed as “Pokémon with guns,” but the game is a bit more than that and its really catching on with players. Over the weekend, the Early Access game (labeled Game Preview on Xbox) was met with a flood of players checking out the twisted open-world survival game. The wild and weird game has managed a peak player count of 1,570,002 on Steam alone — sales exceeded 5 million in its first three days accounting for Windows Store and Xbox Series X|S players.

To put that impressive player count in to perspective, which locks the game in at 3rd place in the all-time record at the time of writing, Palworld is only beaten out by Counter-Strike 2 and PUBG: Battlegrounds. That’s an extremely notable feat not only for an Early Access title, but one that has no affiliation with a pre-existing IP (even if it does draw allusions to the ever-popular Pokémon property).

Tokyo-based developer, PocketPair, can also add “most played Japanese-developed game on Steam” to their list of commendations, as Palworld‘s numbers were formidable enough to dethrone Elden Ring. From Software’s mega-hit is well over half a million away from Palword. Let that sink in for a moment.

As PocketPair continues to reinforce server stability for the sea of players trying to jump in, and is looking to bring the non-Steam versions up to par, there’s no doubt a lot desire to consume whatever content the developer plans to add to their game. We’ll be sure to continue covering Palworld as it progresses through its Early Access/Game Preview journey.