When Palworld launched in January 2024, developer Pocketpair had just one employee overseeing the servers – which were quickly flattened under the weight of 2.1 million players on Steam alone.
"He was trying his best," Palworld global community manager Adam Buckley tells Polygon. At the time, the game's entire dev team was just 35 people, and that's with external developers included. None of them expected the runaway start that made Palworld the third-biggest Steam launch of all time, to say nothing of the Xbox audience which broke 7 million total players by the end of January, and nobody on this planet is ever truly prepared for a launch of this size. Big online games always break for a reason.
