‘He was trying his best’—Palworld had a lone server guy trying to keep the game afloat during its 2 million player launch

While Palworld’s player count has calmed down in the time since its release, it’s still carved a cosy little niche for itself on Steam. SteamDB has it hovering between 20,000 and 50,000 players over the past few months, with a big bump to around 200,000 in December 2024 due to the release of a major update, Feybreak.

Still, that’s small change compared to the onslaught of players during its launch. Palworld rose into viral stardom to the tune of 2 million concurrent players in January 2024—which is huge, with other games, such as Helldivers 2, buckling under comparatively smaller weights. In a recent interview with Polygon, John ‘Bucky’ Buckley, the game’s community manager, paints a picture of panic at the studio.

The initial rumblings started at around 100,000 players, Buckley states, when “a couple of the developers had to go back to their desks because things started to get a bit shaky … Throughout the night it kept going. 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.”

You can actually see that meteoric climb if you consult the SteamDB charts—on Friday, January 19, Palworld was already gaining momentum with around 370,000 concurrents. Over the weekend, this shot up to 1.5 million. “All of our multiplayer capabilities started getting weird, going down and crashing. It was a lot of intense lag, but Epic was amazing. They super quickly allocated more resources to us and they helped out.”

Buckley also adds that, at the time, there was just one guy defending the servers against this horde of newcomers. Buckley remarks that “he was trying his best.” As for the rest of the team, he says “we definitely panicked more than we should have. Didn’t need to pull as many all-nighters as we did. And I wish I’d reached out to other people for advice sooner.

“You get caught up in it, especially when there’s a wind of negative sentiment from players, even if it’s 100% valid and they’re right. It’s very overwhelming when the comments are flooding in.”

Despite my assertions that Palworld was just okay back in January—ones that, I realise, make me a small gust in that wind—I am rooting for it overall, especially since Nintendo has turned its gaze towards Pocketpair. I don’t have to be a big Pal-head to consider the company’s litigious behaviour as, well, troubling for videogames as a whole.