Gotta Shoot Them All: After two and a half years in early access, Palworld has graduated to its full 1.0 release. The "Pokémon with guns" experience is more popular than ever, with a massive influx of new and returning players arriving alongside an unprecedented list of improvements and in-game content additions.
Palworld 1.0 launched on July 10, and players showed their appreciation by flooding its monster-taming world in droves. SteamDB figures show the game peaking at 855,525 concurrent players over launch weekend, then climbing to 961,867 on July 19, its highest count since early 2024 to join in the fun.
Palworld was a sensation a couple of years ago, when Japanese developer Pocketpair pushed the game's early access build onto Steam and Xbox. On Steam alone, Palworld's popularity peaked in January 2024 at 2,101,867 concurrent players, still the third-highest figure in the platform's history behind PUBG: Battlegrounds and Black Myth: Wukong.
The new surge makes Palworld one of today's biggest phenomena on Steam, and because 1.0 shipped the same day on PS5, Xbox Series X|S, Xbox One and Game Pass, the overall player count is likely far higher.
Why exactly is Palworld doing so well despite its less-than-groundbreaking game mechanics?
Before the 1.0 update, the game's Steam build was drawing peaks of around 58,000 players. Now early access veterans are returning to try the new content, and judging from online forums and Reddit posts, they are even pushing friends and family members to try the "full" game as well.
As I can personally attest thanks to my niece and her unhealthy obsession with Genshin Impact, in-family FOMO syndrome can be one hell of a gaming drug.
With version 1.0, Pocketpair introduced a truly hefty number of changes to the previous early access build, with patch notes running roughly 27 pages and brushing up against Steam's character limit. Palworld 1.0 brings new areas to explore and improvements to pre-existing areas, countless gameplay adjustments, and a major rework for the main missions and the story "flow." The upgrade also includes 72 new "Pals," a new "Awakening" mechanic for further Pal powerups, new skills, better "riding" controls, new items, and much more.
Pocketpair drew on and reworked many mechanics found in popular Nintendo games to bring its monster-taming experience to fruition, and Palworld bears a striking resemblance to the money-printing Pokémon franchise, and Nintendo is certainly trying to pursue its legal fight against the game's alleged infringement over its prized IP possessions.
So far, the case has not gone entirely their way. Japan's Patent Office rejected one key patent for lacking originality, and in April the USPTO issued a non-final rejection of all 26 claims in Nintendo's "summon character and fight" patent, citing prior art from Konami and Bandai Namco.
Curiously enough, Pocketpair is against generative AI "slop" when it comes to in-game asset creation. According to the studio's Head of Publishing & Communications John Buckley, gamers have already expressed their dissatisfaction for this kind of AI-assisted content. And if gamers don't want it, why should successful studios waste their time on a concept that might be dead on arrival?