When pal world Released in January 2024, developer Pocketpair had just one employee overseeing the servers, which quickly became crushed under the weight of 2.1 million players on Steam alone.
“I was doing the best I could,” says Palworld global community manager Adam Buckley. Polygon. At the time, the entire game development team consisted of only 35 people, including third-party developers. None of them expected the wild start that made Palworld the third biggest Steam launch of all time, not to mention the Xbox audience that surpassed 7 million total players at the end of January, and no one on this planet is really prepared for a release of this size. Great online games always fail for some reason.
Palworld's player count quickly surpassed 100,000 after the game went live, and that's when technical problems began to worsen. “All night it kept going,” Buckley recalls. “And there was a time, definitely after midnight, because some of us who lived far away had gone home, when the servers went down. That was about a million.”
The Epic Games server worked with Pocketpair to help stabilize the game, and despite some connection and lag issues, Palworld was generally playable for most players outside of its lowest drops. “It was a very intense delay, but Epic was incredible,” Buckley says. “They quickly assigned us more resources and helped us.”
Recently, Pocketpair has been fixing a different Palworld issue: a nintendo lawsuit which has already seen the developer issue two updates that seem silently distance the hit survival game of patent infringements alleged by Nintendo. Capturing and deploying Pals works a little differently nowbut the game is largely the same mix of survival craft shooting under the hood.
Even as the lawsuit for Nintendo's Palworld continues to rumble in the background, developer Pocketpair is releasing its old roguelike card game on Switch.