Remember ‘Palworld’? It’s Survived Meme-Hood, Nintendo And Is Still Big

One of the most surprising days I’ve had in the last few years of game coverage was watching Palworld absolutely blow up at launch, a game that came out of relative nowhere, combining survival aspects with Pokémon-like catching and battling. There were also guns. You could shoot the Pokémon with guns.

It wasn’t just a surprise hit; it was perhaps one of the most surprising rocketships in the last decade of the industry, rocketing to 2.1 million concurrent players on Steam close to launch as scores of big streamers logged on and millions of players tried it out, and liked it.

Though you may think Palworld was a shooting star, the game has had a longer lifespan than you might imagine and has outlasted many other fad games that have come and gone. It’s not a live service, as developer Pocketpair repeatedly points out, but it does release major updates, and those result in significant player surges.

Right now, for example, the game has an 85,000 concurrent peak a year and a half after launch and is inside Steam’s top 15 games, which is almost entirely full of classic titles that rarely leave these spots, from CS2 to Dota 2 to Apex Legends to GTA V.

Of course, Palworld is never going to get millions of concurrents again, but this baseline this far after launch of nearly 100,000 players remains impressive. While it felt like a meme, the playerbase has persisted. Its big updates spike its players anywhere from 140,000 to 212,000 this past December.

Palworld has also engendered a lot of sympathy over the last year or so as they have been relentlessly targeted by lawsuits from Nintendo. Back at launch, there was an idea that Nintendo may sue for similar character designs, as there certainly were some similarities.

But what’s ended up happening is that Nintendo has made a bunch of game mechanic claims that have actually forced Palworld to remove aspects of its gameplay, everything from gliding on Pals to summoning them with balls. These are things Nintendo apparently exclusively owns, and in order to avoid protracted legal fights with the gaming giant, Palworld has to keep bending the knee and changing the game in awkward ways. Nintendo has not come out of this with the public on its side, with accusations that it’s being a patent troll with these kinds of somewhat generic mechanics somehow in its pocket.

Admittedly, I have not kept up with Palworld for a while now, but closer to launch, I easily sunk a few hundred hours into it, and I understood the appeal. In many ways, it felt like the kind of Pokémon game that Nintendo should have made half a decade ago, but never did. And still hasn’t.

Palworld’s appeal is that it can operate as a survival game, a gotta-catch-em-all adventure, or in some ways, it’s even a bit Breath of the Wild. And it not being “live” means you’re never really all that far behind and can jump back in whenever. And it’s very clear that some people never left.

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