Palworld released in early access at the start of 2024 to immediate, headline-making success, selling 2 million copies in 24 hours and becoming the second game in Steam history to hit 2 million concurrent players. Despite rocky servers at launch and some messy business with Nintendo's lawyers over alleged similarities between Palworld and Pokemon, the game is widely considered a modern example of indie success, and the developers at Pocketpair still aren't quite sure of the ingredients in the magic sauce they themselves concocted.
Pocketpair has had solid success with its previous releases, but mostly in Asia, and nothing even remotely comparable to Palworld's international acclaim. At one point the studio expected roughly the same from Palworld.
