Palworld is out of Early Access at last, and launch day (Friday, July 10th) turned into one of the biggest player turnouts Steam has seen all year!
Within hours of the 1.0 update going live, the monster-collecting survival game blew past 470,000 concurrent players on Steam and kept climbing toward the half-million mark. TwistedVoxel pegged the count at 472,769 by late evening in Japan, good enough for fourth-most-played on all of Steam at the time, behind only Counter-Strike 2, PUBG: Battlegrounds, and Dota 2.
For scale, the game normally holds somewhere between 30,000 and 70,000 daily players on Steam. The launch multiplied its usual crowd more than tenfold overnight.
The reviews kept pace. GamesRadar reports the 1.0 build sat at 96 percent positive on Steam through launch day, a score the outlet notes is better than even Pokemon has managed.
The same report calls this the biggest player spike the game has seen since its record-shattering Early Access debut in January 2024, when it peaked at over 2.1 million concurrent players. Before Friday, its best post-launch peak was just over 212,000 back in December 2024.
Pocketpair also announced that the game has passed 40 million lifetime players across every platform, Game Pass subscribers included!
The 1.0 build climbed to fifth place on Steam's global top sellers chart as well, plus ninth on the Japanese chart, all while handing the update to existing owners at no charge.
What's Inside The 1.0 Update?
Forbes' Paul Tassi described the patch notes as "the size of a short story." The full notes run 27 pages and more than 10,000 words, and they reportedly came close to hitting Steam's character limit for announcements.
The headliners: 72 new Pals (47 brand-new plus 25 variants) that bring the total roster to 287, a level cap raised from 65 to 80, and two new regions, including Sunreach, a floating archipelago suspended in the sky above the Palpagos Islands.
The reworked main story now builds toward the World Tree, and Push Square has a breakdown of the rest: 13 new weapons, an Awakening system for strengthening Pals, a Mutation mechanic for breeding stronger creatures, plus overhauled Partner Skills, Raids, and multiplayer.
The best part? The 1.0 update is FREE for everyone who already owns the game, and Pocketpair didn't raise the price for newcomers either. The full release is live on PC, PlayStation 5, Xbox, and Mac, and it's included with Game Pass on day one.
Pocketpair spent months building toward this moment. Back in May, the studio said the 1.0 release date was too big an announcement to drop on Discord, and the turnout proved them right.
The full release also arrived with the Nintendo lawsuit still hanging over the studio. Nintendo and The Pokemon Company sued Pocketpair in September 2024 over patents covering creature-capture and riding mechanics, and Pocketpair has changed several in-game features, including how Pals glide, while the case works through the Japanese courts. There's been no ruling yet, and the 1.0 launch doesn't change the legal picture.
For a game that spent two and a half years in Early Access with a patent fight running in the background, this is about the strongest full-release reception a studio could ask for. Plenty of Early Access games bleed players long before 1.0 ever arrives. Palworld went the other way.
I expected a solid launch here, but fourth place on all of Steam caught me off guard. That's rare air for a survival game, and with two new regions to dig into, I have a feeling those numbers will hold up through the weekend...
Have you jumped back into the Palpagos Islands for 1.0?
Sound off in the comments below!
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