Palworld's multi-million player launch was originally in the hands of just one server guy who was "trying his best"

When Palworld launched in January 2024, developer Pocketpair had just one employee overseeing the servers – which were quickly flattened under the weight of 2.1 million players on Steam alone.

"He was trying his best," Palworld global community manager John Buckley tells Polygon. At the time, the game's entire dev team was just 35 people, and that's with external developers included. None of them expected the runaway start that made Palworld the third-biggest Steam launch of all time, to say nothing of the Xbox audience which broke 7 million total players by the end of January, and nobody on this planet is ever truly prepared for a launch of this size. Big online games always break for a reason.

Palworld's player count quickly blitzed past 100,000 after the game went live, and that's when the technical problems started to compound. "Throughout the night it kept going," Buckley recalls. "And there was a point, definitely after midnight because a few of us had gone home who lived far away, that the servers broke. That was around a million."

Server host Epic Games worked with Pocketpair to help stabilize the game, and despite some connection and lag issues, Palworld was generally playable for most players outside its absolute lowest dips. "It was a lot of intense lag, but Epic was amazing," Buckley says. "They super quickly allocated more resources to us and they helped out."

Recently, Pocketpair has been wrangling a different Palworld problem: a Nintendo lawsuit which has already seen the dev issue two updates that seem to quietly distance the hit survival game from the patent infringements alleged by Nintendo. Capturing and deploying Pals works a bit differently now, but the game is largely the same mix of survival-craft shooting under the hood.

Despite Nintendo's Palworld lawsuit rumbling on in the background, developer Pocketpair releases its old roguelike card game on the Switch.