Xbox says that it is working more closely with Palworld developer Pocketpair and offering extra “support” and “engineering resources” in order to improve the Game Pass sensation more quickly. While it’s attracting record numbers of players, Xbox is clearly keen to tighten up the game’s poor technical performance on its consoles, especially.
As the mind-blowing numbers around sales and player counts keep climbing for Palworld, Xbox has now confirmed in a new blog post that the open-world survival game is Game Pass’ biggest third-party launch ever. A surprise contender for one of the best games of the year, Palworld has reportedly had “more than 7 million players” across the Xbox ecosystem, and has “recently reached a peak of nearly 3 million daily active users on Xbox, making it the most-played game on our platforms at that time.”
That’s impressive stuff – but there’s also no escaping that the game, which is admittedly in early access, can be a very rough experience at times. While I’ve also been sucked in to the Palworld mania on my Xbox Series S, it’s poor performance is hard to ignore. I’ve had well over 15 game crashes, there are bugs around every corner, and traversal feels very clunky.
Pocketpair has already been working super hard to address all of these concerns with updates, but at the end of the day, it’s only a small independent team. Xbox is now stepping in though to help speed up the process of rolling out updates and pushing the game towards leaving early access.
“We’re working with Pocketpair to help provide support for Xbox versions of the game,” Microsoft says in the blog post announcing those massive player count numbers. “We’re providing support to enable dedicated servers, offering engineering resources to help with GPU and memory optimization, speeding up the process to make Palworld updates available for players, and working with the team to optimize the title for our platform.”
The blog also says that Pocketpair and Xbox are working quickly to bring Palworld crossplay to the game, which it has identified as “one of the largest requests from fans”.
While the fires around this game are burning red hot, it’s good to see Xbox moving so fast and offering extra support to Palworld. Giving this support to Pocketpair feels similar to the extra effort Xbox put in with Larian Studios last year to help bring Baldur’s Gate 3 to Xbox consoles after its issues surrounding split-screen co-op play on the Series S. That issue was sorted fairly swiftly, so here’s hoping for similarly quick improvements to Palworld.
For more on the surprise sensation, check out whether a Palworld PS5 version is in the pipeline, and be sure to check out the best Pals you should be catching on your adventures. Oh, and this handy Palworld map collection is definitely worth keeping handy.