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.
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.