Palworld is 2024's first surprise hit, combining all the familiar elements of the popular survival genre with an irresistible layer of Pokémon-inspired Pals to do your bidding. It's a game with no firm endpoint but a finite amount of stuff to do, and so unsurprisingly plenty of players picked it up, played it, and moved onto other things.
Players and developers now have access to a wealth of statistics about games, and a particular bone of contention for many is how numbers like concurrent players can be used as a bit of a cudgel, and sometimes in an inaccurate manner. Concurrents can be a useful guide to how certain multiplayer-focused games are doing (and Palworld does have a large co-op element) but have little value for singleplayer games other than confirming that, yes, a lot of folk bought Starfield and played it on launch day. And Palworld's successful and almost viral launch period saw millions playing the game before, almost a month later, a lot of them have moved onto the next thing.
