Palworld's success led to Xbox's best month ever

News
By Cole Martin
published

More than 10 million players on Xbox spent time with the Game Preview title from Pocketpair, leading to a new record for the console.

Palworld screenshot of a flying Pal
(Image credit: Future via Michael Hoglund)

What you need to know

  • Pocketpair released open-world survival adventure, Palworld, exclusively on Xbox consoles alongside Steam in January 2024.
  • The game, dubbed "Pokemon-with-guns" was an instant success, garnering more than 10,000,000 players on Xbox in just a few months time.
  • ID@Xbox's Chris Charla announced that Xbox had its best month ever when measured by play time in January 2024, due (at least, in part) to the launch of Palworld.

The instant success of Pocketpair's monster-taming multi-genre-mashup, Palworld, seems to have rubbed off a little on Xbox. Microsoft is notoriously opaque when it comes to sharing numbers about Xbox's player base, but ID@Xbox's Chris Charla recently pulled back the curtain in a news post on Xbox.com. In that post, Charla shared that the Xbox console had its biggest month ever in January 2024 when measured by play time. 

Shortly after Palworld's release, it was declared the "biggest third-party launch in Game Pass history", having already garnered around 7 million players within the first few weeks after launching. Player counts shot up across Xbox and Steam alike, and while we may not know what the concurrent record for players was across the game as a whole, we do know it hit a record of 2,101,867 concurrent players on Steam (based on tracking from SteamDB.info).

The success of Xbox and Palworld in January is symbiotic, with Palworld's inclusion in Xbox Game Pass to more players being able to give the game a try on Xbox and Windows PC without any additional expense or risk. However, Palworld's launch was also heavily steeped in controversy as the developers, Pocketpair, were accused of plagiarizing character models from Pokémon and using AI-generated images in the development process. The accusations, many of which proved unfounded, did not seem to dampen the game's success, in the end.

In sharing Palworld and Xbox's record-breaking success in January, Charla took the opportunity to highlight further ID@Xbox's partner program, which Pocketpair is a member of, and the Developer Acceleration Program. These programs, along with a newly available pitch portal, give more independent developers greater access to pitch games to be considered for Xbox Game Pass deals and additional porting and publishing support. 

Cole Martin
Cole Martin
Writer

Cole is the resident Call of Duty know-it-all and indie game enthusiast for Windows Central. She's a lifelong artist with two decades of experience in digital painting, and she will happily talk your ear off about budget pen displays. 

2 Comments Comment from the forums
  • fjtorres5591
    "Palworld's launch was also heavily steeped in controversy as the developers, Pocketpair, were accused of plagiarizing character models from Pokémon and using AI-generated images in the development process."

    Of the two lines of gripes, the former is a matter solely for NINTENDO and their lawyers. With each day that goes on without action the significance of outsider whines goes away. Until that changes, the "controversy" is meaningless. Time to move on.

    On the matter of software generated imagery/assets/code? Grow up, chidren!

    The tech is real, it works, it's here to stay. No amount of pearl clutching posturing is changing that. The djinn is out of the bottle and it ain't going back in. Game development is too hard, too long, too expensive, for studios to give up a whole class to tools that reduce all three enough to make a difference between failure and success.

    All the griping can do is drive studios to hide their use of generative tools, because if a studio can assemble a good successful AAA game in three years with them while their competitor takes 5 years without, guess which studio has a better chance of surviving the post-pandemic gaming correction? Time to give it a rest.
    Reply
  • Cole Martin
    fjtorres5591 said:
    "Palworld's launch was also heavily steeped in controversy as the developers, Pocketpair, were accused of plagiarizing character models from Pokémon and using AI-generated images in the development process."

    Of the two lines of gripes, the former is a matter solely for NINTENDO and their lawyers. With each day that goes on without action the significance of outsider whines goes away. Until that changes, the "controversy" is meaningless. Time to move on.

    On the matter of software generated imagery/assets/code? Grow up, chidren!

    The tech is real, it works, it's here to stay. No amount of pearl clutching posturing is changing that. The djinn is out of the bottle and it ain't going back in. Game development is too hard, too long, too expensive, for studios to give up a whole class to tools that reduce all three enough to make a difference between failure and success.

    All the griping can do is drive studios to hide their use of generative tools, because if a studio can assemble a good successful AAA game in three years with them while their competitor takes 5 years without, guess which studio has a better chance of surviving the post-pandemic gaming correction? Time to give it a rest.
    The next sentence after the two you take issue with expressly states that none of the controversies had any substantial evidence or effect on the game's launch. I'm not sure why you're upset about them.
    Reply