Palworld Loses 97% of Player Count

Palworld, which launched back in January, has seen its player count drop to the lowest level yet. Three months after it dropped, the popular Pokemon-inspired survival game has seen many players leave it behind in favour of newer releases thanks to statistics from SteamDB. But why is this the case? As it turns out, this news isn’t all too surprising and was even an expected outcome from Palworld’s developers Pocket Pair.

With Palworld being a single player game with a final main goal to work towards, once players complete that goal, it makes sense that they’d move on from the project. On top of this, with Palworld not being a live service game, there aren’t constant content drops that attempt to keep players engaged. Palworld achieved its success with an enormous 25 million sales and, much like most single player non-live service games, player retention isn’t all too important or essential to the continued success of this release.

Image by Pocket Pair

Thankfully, despite the lowering player count after the hype has died down, Palworld continues to sell extraordinarily well. As a result, Pocket Pair have said that they will continue to support the project with frequent patches and more substantial updates. In fact, they’ve recently announced a roadmap that includes PvP, Steam-Xbox crossplay and even expansion sized additions such as new areas, pals and bosses for players to interact with. Although the second highest played game ever on Steam has lost a big portion of its player count, it clearly hasn’t lost any momentum as the developers promise chunky improvements coming in the next months and years.