It's not often that a wholly-new IP appears out of nowhere and takes the gaming world by storm— especially not without being Free To Play— but Pocketpair's Palworld has achieved just that. Launched onto Steam Early Access on January 19th, 2024, Palworld serves as the year's first majorly-successful new launch, and has topped Steam's Most Played Games as of January 22nd, 2024.
This means that it only took three days for Palworld to net more players than Valve's own Counter-Strike 2 and Dota 2, as well as mainstays from other devs like PUBG: Battlegrounds, Apex Legends, and Grand Theft Auto V. Sorry, Baldur's Gate 3: you aren't Top 8 anymore. There's a new dominant PC RPG in town, and it carries an odd sense of familiarity.
