Everyone seems to be playing Palworld at the moment. Over the weekend, the monster-taming, base-building survival game broke Steam records as its active player count peaked at 1,291,967 players. That is an incredibly high player count.
To put that into perspective, Palworld has now surpassed the likes of Cyberpunk 2077, Dota 2, Lost Ark, Counter-Strike, Baldur’s Gate 3 and PUBG in overall active players. At the time of writing, Palworld had more players playing the game than Counter-Strike 2.
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Of course, the game hasn’t come close to surpassing other games when it comes to their highest player peak count. PUBG, for example, peaked six years ago at over 3 million players. Counter-Strike has also peaked at 1.8 million players. Palworld’s 1.3 million players, however, is still impressive and beats Cyberpunk 2077’s 1 million active players. The game was only a few thousand players short of beating Dota 2’s 1,295,114 players.
While the Palworld success is an achievement for the game, it has also gained some negative attention. Fans have criticized the game for blatantly copying the Pokemon series. Some of the monster designs in Palworld have been seemingly taken directly out of Pokemon. Many of the monsters also feature slightly tweaked designs compared to the Pokemon.
On Twitter, some fans have pointed out the obvious by sharing designs across both games.
since I’m bored as hell, I’m gonna be making a thread of this i think… Palworld design analysis trying to spot every pokemon they jumbled together pic.twitter.com/Ch9jcx5hCI
— onion_mu (@onion_mu) January 18, 2024
Even with all this controversy, Palworld is still doing very well on Steam. The game is also on Xbox and is available through Xbox Game Pass. So the player count represented on the SteamDB page is likely much higher when you take into consideration other platforms.
Source: SteamdDB
