Palworld Skyrockets To 19 Million Players, Is The Biggest 3rd Party Game Pass Launch Ever

Surprise hit Palworld’s momentum marches on, with the game having reached 19 million players while simultaneously becoming the most successful third-party launch of all time on Xbox’s Game Pass service. According to Pocketpair, the game’s developer, Steam users account for 12 million of its player base. Meanwhile, 7 million players on Xbox have played the game with a little under 3 million active daily users on the platform.

Pocketpair CEO Takuro Mizobe made clear that the development team is paying attention to issues the game’s community are bringing up, and that the team will be working diligently to make improvements. Mizobe says that “this is just the beginning for us and Palworld, and the feedback we’re gathering while in Game Preview will allow us to continue to improve the experience for Pal Tamers across all platforms.”


This unexpected success is leading to Xbox giving Pocketpair direct support while the game continues to work through its early preview phase. Xbox says, “we’re working with Pocketpair to help provide support for Xbox versions of the game. We’re providing support to enable dedicated servers, offering engineering resources to help with GPU and memory optimization, speeding up the process to make Palworld updates available for players, and working with the team to optimize the title for our platform.”

It's not often that Xbox will lend this kind of help to a game developer. Late last year the company provided similar support to Larian Studios as it struggled to get Baldur’s Gate 3 on the platform because of the limitations of the Xbox Series S. For those who might not be aware, Baldur’s Gate 3 was crowned Game of the Year for 2023 by The Game Awards.

That Xbox is doing this for Palworld shows how important Xbox thinks it is to have this game running smoothly on its platform, and how Palworld is now seemingly an IP that will have staying power.