After recovering from the "supernatural" success of Palworld's early access launch, Pocketpair comms and publishing lead John Buckley had more modest expectations for the 1.0 update.
If the game had hit 200,000 concurrent players with 1.0, less than 10% of Palworld's launch peak, "that'd be party time," he says. Instead, Palworld 1.0 rocketed straight to 960,000 concurrents on Steam alone, and about five times Buckley's expectations globally. Before 1.0, the game was hovering around the 45,000 CCU mark on Steam.
