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.