Palworld May Have Become the Biggest 2024 Game

Palworld is a title that may have snuck under many's radars despite the fact that it had been one of Steam's top-wishlisted games. Its official X account dates back to the 14th of September 2022 (in the light ages when it used to be called Twitter), and from there, it seemed like Palworld would continue a normal development route.

That is, until the release of the game on the 19th of January 2024. After a long time in development and only a 10-day heads-up for release, Palworld came out on Steam Early Access, and while many looked forward to it, no one anticipated how massive the release would be. Not only did the game already hit a massive milestone just 24 hours after release in terms of sales, but it's also become the biggest game to come out in 2024 so far.

If you don't know what Palworld is, then we've got you covered — it's a dark creature collector game (a la Pokémon) where you will head out into an open world in survival gameplay... armed with guns. And you can arm your Pals, too, for even more firepower. This premise shook the world, as not many expected the release of this game to be so big.

So big, in fact, that it's still hitting all-time peaks. To give this a bit of a preamble, Pocket Pair's highly anticipated game was the 8th most-wishlisted game by the time I wrote my article on The Most Anticipated Games According to Steam Wishlists, where I took a quick look at the games coming out in 2024 and their followers and wishlist score. At the time of writing, Palworld had 127,649 followers and was a behemoth in its own right, though stomped by seven other titles above it and several that breached the 200,000 follower mark.

However, Palworld hit new all-time peak players by the hour. It seemed like it would stagnate at the highest number of 370,128 on the 19th of January, just eight hours after the release of the game, but out of nowhere, the all-time peaks skyrocketed. Six hours after its 19th of January all-time peak, Palworld started getting more and more traction, slowly surpassing it by 5,000, then the next hour by 31,000, and then every hour thenceforth it was an extra 30,000 players or more.

Now, at the time of writing, Palworld has hit peaks that placed it as one of the most played games... ever. That's right, a prestigious title previously claimed by Baldur's Gate 3 and Hogwarts Legacy in 2023, Palworld is just shy of a few thousand gamers playing consecutively to have reached the heights of these two, at 855,706 all-time peak.

This sets Palworld as one of the most-played games on Steam by quite a landslide — it claims the 10th spot just behind Baldur's Gate 3 and Hogwarts Legacy, all the while trumping the previous 10th spot — Goose Goose Duck — by over 150,000 players. And this is all within 24 hours of being released. And it's currently the second most-played Steam game at the moment, just behind Counter-Strike 2.

Palworld is shaping up to be one of the biggest releases of the year, and it's hard to see what's going to top such a strongly successful title so early into 2024, but we look forward to when other behemoths release, like Hades II! If you want to join the hype, now's the time to play with thousands of other players globally!