"We hit this disgusting number that makes me feel sick": Palworld devs don't know why their survival game was so successful - "If we knew how to do it, we'd do it again"

Palworld released in early access at the start of 2024 to immediate, headline-making success, selling 2 million copies in 24 hours and becoming the second game in Steam history to hit 2 million concurrent players. Despite rocky servers at launch and some messy business with Nintendo's lawyers over alleged similarities between Palworld and Pokemon, the game is widely considered a modern example of indie success, and the developers at Pocketpair still aren't quite sure of the ingredients in the magic sauce they themselves concocted.

Pocketpair has had solid success with its previous releases, but mostly in Asia, and nothing even remotely comparable to Palworld's international acclaim. At one point the studio expected roughly the same from Palworld.

"The initial thinking for Palworld was that this was a game for a Japanese audience again," said Pocketpair community manager John 'Bucky' Buckley during a Game Developer's Conference panel. "But we quickly got over a million wishlists within that first year, so we knew at that point that something was happening. It kept going. 2023 was when things got really weird: we rose to number three on Steam wishlists [...] and then we hit this crazy peak around November 2023. This peak never really stopped, it just kept going. People always ask us, 'Why? What happened? How did you get so much attention?' We don't know. If we knew how to do it, we'd do it again, but we have no idea what happened."

Palworld's technical issues at launch mirrored those of many indie games that release to a degree of success that the developers hadn't anticipated. Enshrouded comes to mind, as does Helldivers 2. For Pocketpair, the initial realization that Palworld would become something special came on launch night.

"Not a lot of people know this, but most of our company at that time was a remote company," Buckley said. "We had an office, but very few people went to the office. But everyone went on launch day. It was going to be a little celebration, a little bit of alcohol, a little bit of fun, and then go home. So we launched the game, went over to the vending machine, and started drinking. About 20 minutes later, our network engineer, our one network engineer, said the game has crashed. The Epic servers have crashed. That's when things started to get weird."

"Within that first week, we hit this disgusting number that makes me feel sick when I see it," he added. "And this was basically split over Steam and Xbox, which were our two platforms at that time. Again, why did we get this many players? I don't know, please don't ask me. I know someone will ask me after, but I promise you we don't know the answer. It really was unbelievable, and just seeing this today still kind of freaks me out. We finished off the month with 25 million players, that was 30 days post-release, and this was kind of the last time we ever publicly spoke about player numbers. There's a few reasons for this, but basically the short version is that there were some bad vibes coming, and these bad vibes convinced us to stop marketing for a while and go a little bit quiet."

The bad vibes Buckley is referencing include the sentiment that Palworld was basically "Pokemon with guns," something an indie developer is understandably likely to bristle at considering The Pokemon Company's famously trigger-happy legal team. During the panel, he also discussed the hate the game received, accusations of plagiarized and AI-generated designs, and the threats sent to developers. Buckley said during the same GDC panel that Nintendo's Palworld lawsuit "came as a shock" to Pocketpair because patent infringement was "something that no one even considered."

Regardless, Palworld has been an enduring success, having recently topped 32 million players. Just don't ask Pocketpair how that happened.

Palworld dev reckons "very few companies could survive" a launch like theirs: "A lot of companies might crumble under the threats, under the pressure, under the negativity."