Palworld CEO Reveals Servers Cost A Cool Half Million A Month To Host The Smash Hit

If you have somehow missed this story as it has been evolving, Japanese indie hit Palworld has been tearing up the leaderboards on both Steam and Xbox platforms. As we reported on Thursday, it has over 19 million players between the two stores, and while it's available on Game Pass, the majority of the players are actually on Steam.

Now, Palworld is a multiplayer game. You can play it solo, but it's intended to be played with up to 32 players in a single massive open world. This is one of many characteristics that the survival game inherited from Minecraft, ARK Survival Evolved, and similar "survival-craft" titles. Multiplayer games need game servers, and while you can host your own dedicated server for your friends, there are indeed quite a number of official servers as well.


So many, in fact, that the cost of keeping the game alive is turning out to be phenomenally high. The CEO of Pocketpair, the game's developer, posted a jocular message on X (above) joking about the idea that the company could go bankrupt due to the fees from hosting the servers for the game, which are apparently in the range of 70,053,000 Japanese yen, or about $478,000.


Lead network engineer for the company posted this tweet as a reply to his boss, explaining the situation to the company's English fans. He says that he was told to "never let the service go down no matter what", so he has "prepared servers without regard to cost." The fees are certainly exorbitant, and we're quite confident that Pocketpair could secure less expensive hosting, but we have to admire the company's dedication to supporting its products and fans.


Earlier in the week, Mizobe and Hiroto shared another amusing exchange; despite it being Saturday, the company CEO was hard at work debugging Palworld, which Hiroto attributed to the game's unprecedented success. Pocketpair is a small company, so to see this kind of interest in its game has to be completely overwhelming. The title has received a few updates already including some significant bug fixes, but there's still a long way to go for the internet's new favorite survival-crafter game.