The inevitable has happened. For years, PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds’ record for concurrent players on Steam was an insurmountable obstacle set at 3 million. Then Palworld came in not longer than a week ago with guns blazing and blasted through every preconceived notion of the least of time required for games to go viral.
Whereas it took PUBG several months and an Early Access exit to hit the three million figure, Palworld now stands to hit the same mark in much, much less time. It’s now just the second game to hit 2 million players on Steam and it isn’t even it’s second weekend yet.
Only six games have managed to hit the one million concurrent player mark on Steam: PUBG, Palworld, Counter-Strike 2, Lost Ark, DOTA 2, and Cyberpunk 2077. Furthermore, only two, PUBG and Palworld, have broken 2 million. In addition, the other games on the list generally peaked at one million or so, and it took them years to reach that figure, like with DOTA 2 and Counter-Strike 2. Thus, this makes Palworld’s record all the more impressive.
Unlike with PUBG, SteamDB didn’t confirm the achievement on its official X account (presumably because it happened not long after it congratulated Palworld for surpassing Counter-Strike 2’s numbers). As of the time of writing, Palworld’s peak player count is at 2,018,905.
The question now is: how high can Palworld go? We can’t exactly say the numbers are inflated because people around the world aren’t all on holiday, or in lockdown. Also, the time gaps between Palworld’s daily milestones, or the lack thereof, suggest that the growth isn’t slowing down at all. At this point, the player numbers aren’t tailing off anytime soon. Surpassing PUBG’s player count is all but a foregone conclusion.
After this, what’s the ceiling? 3.5 million? 4 million? What about 5 million or even 6 million? We’ll just have to wait and see if it can do those and outgross Hogwarts Legacy in two weeks.
Alongside the game’s latest concurrent player record, Palworld continues to strike the nerves of developers and critics alike. AI use, cheating, plagiarism accusations and lawsuit threats dominate the Palworld conversation. Although one critic, who was adamant that Palworld used AI, has since admitted that he made stuff up because they didn’t like the game’s portrayal of animal abuse.
Pocketpair, the game’s admittedly overwhelmed developers, have denied all the allegations and revealed a surprisingly robust roadmap with promising content that comes AFTER the necessary fixes for “critical issues” in Palworld.
