What you need to know
- Pocketpair released open-world survival adventure, Palworld, exclusively on Xbox consoles alongside Steam in January 2024.
- The game, dubbed "Pokemon-with-guns" was an instant success, garnering more than 10,000,000 players on Xbox in just a few months time.
- ID@Xbox's Chris Charla announced that Xbox had its best month ever when measured by play time in January 2024, due (at least, in part) to the launch of Palworld.
The instant success of Pocketpair's monster-taming multi-genre-mashup, Palworld, seems to have rubbed off a little on Xbox. Microsoft is notoriously opaque when it comes to sharing numbers about Xbox's player base, but ID@Xbox's Chris Charla recently pulled back the curtain in a news post on Xbox.com. In that post, Charla shared that the Xbox console had its biggest month ever in January 2024 when measured by play time.
Shortly after Palworld's release, it was declared the "biggest third-party launch in Game Pass history", having already garnered around 7 million players within the first few weeks after launching. Player counts shot up across Xbox and Steam alike, and while we may not know what the concurrent record for players was across the game as a whole, we do know it hit a record of 2,101,867 concurrent players on Steam (based on tracking from SteamDB.info).
The success of Xbox and Palworld in January is symbiotic, with Palworld's inclusion in Xbox Game Pass to more players being able to give the game a try on Xbox and Windows PC without any additional expense or risk. However, Palworld's launch was also heavily steeped in controversy as the developers, Pocketpair, were accused of plagiarizing character models from Pokémon and using AI-generated images in the development process. The accusations, many of which proved unfounded, did not seem to dampen the game's success, in the end.
In sharing Palworld and Xbox's record-breaking success in January, Charla took the opportunity to highlight further ID@Xbox's partner program, which Pocketpair is a member of, and the Developer Acceleration Program. These programs, along with a newly available pitch portal, give more independent developers greater access to pitch games to be considered for Xbox Game Pass deals and additional porting and publishing support.
