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Palworld continues to break records, with 1.8 million concurrent players on SteamThe second highest ever
The second highest ever
Image credit:Rock Paper Shotgun/Pocketpair
Image credit:Rock Paper Shotgun/Pocketpair
Palworld, that survival game mashup, continues to grow in popularity. In the past 24 hours, its peak concurrent player count reached 1,864,421, the second highest of any game on Steam, ever. It took that spot fromCounter-Strike 2and the only game to reach higher is now PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds, aka Plunkbat, aka PUBG.
Katharine has been playing Palworld andis less than impressed, finding it a cynical, joyless, possibly meanspirited mixture of Pokémon creature designs withArk: Survival Evolved-style survival and crafting systems.
Edwin, meanwhile, has spoken to a lawyer about those creature designs andwhether Palworld infringes Pokémon’s copyright. The growing consensus seems to be that the designs probably do enough to just skirt around any possible restrictions - although it’s a different story ifyou’re trying to make a mod that adds Pokémon to Palworld.
It’s of little surprise to me that Palworld is popular with players or that it’s unpopular with critics. There ought to be a difference between critical and commercial consensus in games more often - just as, y’know, Fast X can make hundreds of millions at the box office without Louis Leterrier being expected to pick up an Oscar nomination or Jason Momoa’s performance being expected to get glorious praise from the New Yorker’s film critics.
Even if it is trash - and I haven’t played it, so I have no opinion either way - I can find reasons to be cheerful about Palworld’s success. For one, it seems like a continuation of what Pocketpair were doing withOverdungeon, a gameI enjoyed. For two, it’s evidence that a hugely successful game really can come from anywhere. I’ll be interested to see how many of those players it’s retained a couple of months from now.
