Palworld continues to amaze. The rough-around-the-edges but incredibly addictive survival game has just hit its latest player count milestone. According to developer Pocketpair, the total Palworld player count across all platforms is now at a staggering 25 million, with 10 million of those players being on Xbox.
No one expected Palworld to go down as one of the best Xbox games of 2024, let alone potentially being one of the most popular of this console generation. While combining elements of the best survival games, the best open-world games, and monster-catchers like Pokémon sounds like a winning combination, it seemed unlikely that an indie developer would be able to stitch it all together into something that would be this successful. Even the draw of giving a cute green chipmunk a submachine gun doesn’t account for this many players.
Pocketpair reveals in a new social media post that Palworld’s “total number of players exceeds 25 million”, and this announcement comes just over a month since the game launched in early access on Xbox and PC. How many of the critically-acclaimed, triple-A best Xbox Game Pass games can claim to have those kind of numbers, eh?
The developer further crunches the numbers by confirming that 15 million players have bought the game on Steam, while 10 million have accessed it through the Xbox ecosystem. It doesn’t say how many of those 10 million are paid sales and how many are downloads through Game Pass, but regardless, it’s a big old number.
Microsoft already confirmed at the end of January that Palworld was the biggest ever third-party release onto Game Pass, and at the time had racked up a total of seven million players. That means that although a lot of the hype has settled down, it’s still managed to attract an extra three million Xbox players throughout February.
This has all been achieved despite the absences of a Palworld PS5 version. While Palworld is not tied to any exclusivity with Xbox (that we know of), and Pocketpair stated before the game launched that it would explore bringing it to PS5 in the future, we haven’t heard any more about it since.
It’s also hit this milestone despite being riddled with bugs and performance issues – something that Xbox has stepped in to help Pocketpair address. We’ve lost count of how many game crashes we’ve had on Xbox consoles and how many times we’ve fallen through the map when spawning in, but it certainly hasn’t stopped us (and 25 million others) from getting hooked.
For more on one of 2024’s biggest new Xbox games, check out this ace Palworld tool that shows you the easiest way to breed elite-tier Pals. Or you can brush up on the Palworld bosses you’ll need to defeat during your adventure.