Forget about setting a new record as the best-selling indie game of all time – Palworld is on track to becoming one of the best-selling video games in its first year.
The Pokémon-like game, developed by Pocketpair, has sold 7 million copies in five days, the developers said on X, also known as Twitter, on Wednesday. It has now officially outsold The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim to become the third-fastest-selling video game of all time, just right below 2022’s Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 and 2013’s Grand Theft Auto V.
The sales figures for the creature hunting game, which reportedly only cost the developers a billion yen to make (it’s about USD$6.8 million, give or take), come amidst discussions about the developer’s AI use and blatant plagiarism of Pokémon designs.
#Palworld has sold over 7 million copies in only 5 days!
Thank you very much!!
We continue to be hard at work addressing the issues and bugs some users are experiencing.
Thanks for your support! pic.twitter.com/8S9xKJEMjR
— Palworld (@Palworld_EN) January 24, 2024
Some continue to call for a boycott of Palworld, but this negative publicity has only done the game well. The constant back-and-forth discussions about whether or not Palworld copied Pokémon has grown particularly heated in the video game community, where even developers have called out Pocketpair for potentially cheating their way to making the game.
Ironically, Hogwarts Legacy, which sold 12 million copies in 12 days last year and made nearly a billion in revenue in two weeks, was just as controversial.
By year’s end, Hogwarts Legacy had sold more than 22 million copies, enough to make it the first game that wasn’t made by Activision Blizzard or Take-Two Interactive to top the annual sales charts.
SteamDB, a database that shows the concurrent playercount of games listed on Steam, shows that Palworld is now the second-most-played video game on the platform of all time. It’s on track to breach past the two-million-player mark in a few days, en route to possibly dethroning PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds at 3.2 million players.
While many continue to call Palworld a lawsuit waiting to happen, Pocketpaid remains committed to supporting the game. It’s expected to stay in Early Access for at least a year, but the developers won’t hesitate to give it more time if it feels like it needs more polish.
Palworld is currently available exclusively on Xbox Series S/X, Steam, Microsoft Store, and Epic Games Store. It’s also on Game Pass. Unfortunately, it’s unclear if Palworld is coming to PlayStation or Nintendo platforms.
