Palworld has now surpassed 32 million players a year after release, though lawsuits filed by Nintendo remain unresolved.
Developer Pocketpair shared the news on social media, with those player numbers across Steam, Xbox and PS5.
The news arrives as the game receives its latest update, fixing crashes on Xbox and Steam Deck, reworking the Random Pal mode, and making various balance adjustments and bug fixes.
It’s been a rocky year Pocketpair and its monster-catching game, which first caught the attention of players for its Pokémon-with-guns aesthetic.
Upon release, the game hit two million players in just 24 hours and its all-time concurrent player peak on Steam remains just over two million players. Two weeks later, the game had surpassed 19 million players across PC and Xbox Series X/S, with Microsoft touting it as the biggest third-party launch in Game Pass history.
The launch was soured, though, by comparisons with the Pokémon series, with fans calling the Pal designs “lazy”
The game eventually arrived on Sony’s PS5 in September, to further expand the playerbase. And that will increase further once a mobile release arrives, developed by Krafton’s PUBG Studios.
However, Nintendo dropped a major bombshell in September when it filed a patent infringement lawsuit against Pocketpair, following a statement back in January it would “investigate and take appropriate measures”.
Pocketpair vowed to fight the lawsuit on behalf of fans and indie developers. “Pocketpair is a small indie game company based in Tokyo,” it said. “Our goal as a company has always been to create fun games. We will continue to pursue this goal because we know that our games bring joy to millions of gamers around the world.”
It added: “It is truly unfortunate that we will be forced to allocate significant time to matters unrelated to game development due to this lawsuit. However, we will do our utmost for our fans, and to ensure that indie game developers are not hindered or discouraged from pursuing their creative ideas.”
In November, Pocketpair provided further details on the lawsuit, revealing it related to three patents filed by Nintendo between February and July of 2024, which relate back to a pre-existing parent patent from December 2021. These patents cover gameplay mechanics like capturing digital creatures and riding them.
A month later, Pocketpair ditched its Pokéball-style summoning mechanic.
Most recently, Nintendo has filed a number of patent applications in the US, as reported by GamesFray. These appear to relate to similar patents filed in Japan. However, at present there is no suggestion Nintendo is bringing US litigation against Pocketpair – for now, the lawsuit remains in Japan.
Still, development on Palworld is ongoing, as Pocketpair is adding an “ending scenario” as part of its second year roadmap, as well as co-op crossplay. It won’t be the end of Palworld, though, as community manager John “Bucky” Buckley confirmed to Eurogamer this ending has been “mapped out for quite some time”.
“As a company, we’ve learned how to structure our processes better,” Bucky told Eurogamer, discussing the past year. “People often forget that Pocketpair is quite a small team. The methods we’ve used for our previous games worked well, but Palworld put a spotlight on both our weaknesses and strengths. This year really brought the team together and made us more effective in our workflows.”