Palworld Breaks New Game Pass Record With 7 Million Players Since Launch

Palworld, a new survival game that launched day one on Game Pass 10 days ago has just broke a new record for Microsoft’s Game Pass service. With over 7 million Xbox players since launch, Palworld is now the biggest third-party launch in Game Pass history. Microsoft said today that it also broke another record by becoming the most-played third-party day one release on Xbox Cloud Gaming.

Often described as “Pokemon with guns”, Palworld, which launched in early access on PC and Xbox on January 19, is already on track to become one of the biggest game releases of 2024. On Steam, the game has already sold 12 million copies, and the total number of players on Valve’s platform has crossed 19 million players since launch.

🎉Total number of players exceeds 19 million🎉

It's been less than two weeks since #Palworld was released, thank you!

・Steam: 12 million~ copies
・Xbox: 7 million~ players

We will continue to prioritize fixing bugs!
Thank you for your continued support of #Pocketpair! pic.twitter.com/twgAeYVL07

— Palworld (@Palworld_EN) January 31, 2024

“The response from fans has been tremendous and it’s incredible to see the millions of players around the world enjoying Palworld. 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.”

Microsoft’s Game Pass service is often being accused of killing game sales. Last month, Swen Vincke, the founder of Baldur’s Gate 3 – one of the biggest games released in 2023 – said in an interview with IGN that the CRPG title would not be coming to Game Pass as it wouldn’t make financial sense for the independent studio. “We made a big game, so I think there’s a fair price to be paid for that,” Vincke said. “This is what allows us to continue making other games,” he added.

Well, it seems that Palworld’s day one availability on Game Pass has definitely not hurt sales of the game. However, most of the userbase bought the game on Steam, as the version of Palworld that’s available on Xbox consoles and the Microsoft Store on PC isn’t up to date with the Steam version. As an example, multiplayer is restricted to just 4 players in the Microsoft Store version of the game versus up to 32 players on the Steam version, which has dedicated servers.

While there’s no cross-play between Steam and Xbox/Microsoft players right now, this is something Palword developers are working on with the help of Microsoft. “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,” the Xbox team said today.