After recovering from the "supernatural" success of Palworld's early access launch, Pocketpair comms and publishing lead John Buckley had more modest expectations for the 1.0 update.
If the game had hit 200,000 concurrent players with 1.0, less than 10% of Palworld's launch peak, "that'd be party time," he says. Instead, Palworld 1.0 rocketed straight to 960,000 concurrents on Steam alone, and about five times Buckley's expectations globally. Before 1.0, the game was hovering around the 45,000 CCU mark on Steam.
Speaking with GamesRadar+ at Gamescom, Buckley examines the "huge success" of Palworld 1.0. "Thank you, gamers," he says. "As cliche as it might sound, we didn't expect it to go that well. Genuinely. 900,000 CCU, insane amount of sales yet again. We're really, really happy. Again, very life changing for the studio."
When we spoke to Buckley earlier in the year at GDC, he described Palworld's launch as an anomaly that he couldn't explain. So, the folks at Pocketpair didn't want to bank on lightning striking twice.
He still seems perplexed by it. "The early access release was supernatural," he reiterates. "It's the only word you can use. It shouldn't exist, that kind of level."
Buckley says Pocketpair was confident that update 1.0 would see a healthy wave of returning players who "haven't played in two years" coming back to check out the new stuff. What he and the team didn't expect was for the wave of players buying and playing the game for the first time to be so large.
"I really don't want to use the word market cap because it sounds awful, but you do at some point think Palworld's kind of reached the audience now," he reasons. "We expected it to go quite well. Personally, I was like, if we can hit about 200k, it's a crazy CCU. 200k, that'd be party time. And again, it's five times that."
Buckley examines the Palworld audience in a little more detail, with Pocketpair actively expanding into spinoffs and other genres like cuter farm sim Palfarm and a third-party Palworld MMO. "I think the end goal is not that there's a Palworld for everyone, but a Palworld for lots of people," he says. "If there's peoples' ideal version of Palworld.
"The reason we're making the farming game [Palfarm] is because one of the very, very earliest things people were asking for was Palworld but just a bit cozier. Palworld with a bit less of the guns or making bases and stuff. 'I don't want to grind resources, I just want to hang out with my Pals.' That's Palfarm. That's the intention of Palfarm. I think if we can start doing things like this, Palworld can become its own thing."
