Massive viral Pokemon-like hit Palworld has lost the vast majority of its playerbase only a few months after release, Steam stats have revealed.
News in brief
- Palworld's player numbers have dropped by a massive 94%
- But Pocket Pair doesn't have a lot to worry about
After debuting to huge popularity, Palworld has seen a precipitous drop-off in player numbers. At its peak, the game racked up over 2.1 million players at the same time, but has (at the time of writing) achieved just a 24 hour peak of 120,000 players. That's a fall of over 94%, which is a huge percentage decrease to see. Falls are natural, but for comparison, Helldivers 2, which launched only a month later, has maintained most of its popularity, with a 24 hour peak still well over 300,000, after an all-time peak of 458,000.
Palworld is simple to sum up — it's Pokemon, but with guns and in an open world. If you think that sounds amazing, well, you're not wrong, and millions of people agreed with you. The game took off quickly, and has made the developers of the game millions in revenue so far. So much, in fact, that they're not quite sure what to do with all the cash.
But is this downturn in player count something that Pocket Pair should worry about? A drop in the high-90% range looks devastating, and for any number of games this would be true. But we're reckoning with a game that had truly massive popularity, so even such a large drop as 94% still leaves the game in a very respectable place. 120,000 players isn't a small number, and it still makes the game very popular.
It's also worth noting that, unlike Helldivers 2, which we compared it to, Palworld hasn't seen much in the way of additional content or social media buzz since launch. So a higher than average drop is to be expected, and is entirely natural. It's unlikely to worry Pocket Pair too much either, which has confirmed it won't be moving its studios' focus to triple-A games, and will instead use the profits from Palworld to fund a number of smaller projects. And really, isn't that the best way to approach such success?