Palworld Passes 40 Million Players Ahead of Its 1.0 Release

Pocketpair's Palworld has been in Early Access since the 19th of January, 2024. Setting a good precedent for the rest of the year, this open-world creature collector with survival crafting elements shook the world and set a precedent that would be hard to follow throughout the rest of the year.

Its all-time peak concurrent players was a tiny 2,101,867 just a week after release, on the 27th of January 2024. This prestigious achievement earned it the third most-played game on Steam ever, surpassed only by Black Myth: Wukong and PUBG: BATTLEGROUNDS, though impressively, it's even passed Valve's Counter-Strike 2 in terms of player count.

This has put Palworld in the public eye for a long time, especially following the Nintendo lawsuit that sought to double down on patents that were rejected by the Japanese patent office. It's been in its Early Access state for months, but just a few days before the 1.0 release, the game reached an impressive sales milestone.

Set to release on the 10th of July, Palworld hasn't managed to reach its 1.0 release just yet, with a massive update set to arrive just at the start of this very weekend. With more pals, more content, and plenty of stuff to do, it's even likely this is just the beginning of the game, with more updates to come (and if not, more spinoffs, as we've already seen the franchise establishing).

Still, Palworld just announced that the game has sold over 40 million copies, a number that is — frankly — too big to even fathom. To put that into perspective, it felt like no one would shut up about 2022's ELDEN RING for years (myself included), and even though that game has been in the market for two more years than Palworld, it's sold 30 million copies. Again, not a number to sneeze at, but 25% smaller than Pocketpair's creature-collecting open world crafting title.

Even that doesn't put it into perspective enough — 40 million copies sold ties Palworld for the 19th most-sold game in the entire videogame industry's existence, according to the best-selling videogames Wikipedia page. This ties it with Sonic the Hedgehog (from 1991), Payday 2, Hogwarts Legacy, and Cyberpunk 2077.

To celebrate the milestone, a new trailer dropped on the Pocketpair Palworld YouTube channel, where the team gives a brief about all of the content that has been released since the Early Access launch. This includes three major content updates throughout the span of 2024 and three others throughout 2025, with the culmination of 1.0 in 2026.

You can check out the history of Palworld and what you need to know, especially as a quick digest ahead of the 1.0 launch.