How Palworld went viral and made its way to version 1.0

Palworld was in development for around four-and-a-half years prior to its launch into version 1.0 last month on July 10th.

Speaking at CGDC during ChinaJoy 2026, Pocketpair head of publishing and communications John Buckley delved into Palworld’s journey to Early Access and then to its full release.

Prior to Palworld, the studio had around 20 to 25 staff and worked on games such as 2019’s Overdungeon and 2020’s Craftopia. The latter in particular helped provide a springboard for its future ambitions.

The company has scaled to 90 staff, plus 20 contractors. That’s off the back of the huge popularity of Palworld, a monster-collecting game mixed into the company’s area of expertise: open-world survival crafting. 

Prior to its release, during development the characters were created by a “small army of artists”, who would internally vote on designs. Buckley said what many people might not know, however, is that a lot of Pals were named by players. “So before the game was released, a lot of players were invested in the growing brand.”

"Surreal" Early Access

While the team knew from early community engagement the game would do well, the launch was “crazier” and on a “scale that we can not imagine”.

“Our servers were on fire,” said Buckley, while Discord, Epic Services and Steam crashed. “It was a very surreal time releasing this game.”

At launch, Palworld had the third highest peak on Steam of all time at 2.1m players. Palworld quickly went on to sell 25 million copies.

After the blockbuster launch, Pocketpair encountered what Buckley said was a unique problem. Suddenly, “the game is dead”. He was referring to the fall from 2.1 million peak players to 300,000 - a figure he noted most developers would be pretty happy with - and the backlash from some media outlets around the drop.

“We didn’t know what to do,” he said, highlighting that maintaining that number of players at launch “is impossible”. Only a small number of games have achieved this in Steam’s history, such as PUBG Mobile.

But following the Early Access release and on the road to the launch of version 1.0, Buckley said a “very strong community had started to form”. The team, he added, realised it had to “stop thinking about the media” and the drama and start focusing on the players and their feedback to make the title as popular as possible.

If Palworld 1.0 was to be a big success, the studio would have to engage with the community, he said.

Launching version 1.0

Over the next two years, Palworld shipped six major updates that were “very successful” for the game. But to get to 1.0, the studio came up with three strategies:

• Through marketing, bring back inactive players from 2024 by showing them just how much the game has changed.
• Reach out to every creator who has streamed or made Palworld content in the past.
• Daily reveals of new pals, new content and new areas on socials to build awareness.

On the latter point, Buckley said that in China, Pocketpair was extremely successful. Every day the studio released “super short” content on BiliBili. After a very slow start, the studio learned that “if you just keep doing it, keep talking about it … it just starts taking over”. The views began to go up and up, he said.

With the launch of Palworld 1.0 on July 10th, 2026, version 1.0 attracted 900,000 concurrent players and achieved a 93.45% rating from 443k reviews. At the time of writing, Palworld has 445k concurrent players - making it the third most played game on Steam right now.

Moving forward, Pocketpair is working on “small” spin-offs such as cosy game Palfarm and romance title Palworld - More than Just Pals.

The studio has also opened a spin-off company with Aniplex and Sony Music called Palworld Entertainment to focus on IP expansion outside of video games, including plushies, toys and a recently released card game.

In closing, Buckley offered advice to other developers - make what you want, and someone will probably enjoy it. “Don’t worry about trends, what’s popular,” he said.

We asked a few questions after the talk. On the Palworld Mobile game, which Pocketpair is collaborating with Krafton on, Buckley didn’t have any updates other than the release date would be “soon”.

Asked if AI was used to help make the game, he said the tech was not utilised - noting that development of Palworld was started before the generative AI craze.

Buckley was unable to offer the latest sales numbers for Palworld.

He was also asked how Pocketpair draws the line between originality and inspiration - with the game often compared to Pokémon and that IP's character designs. He said to make a game that appeals to a lot of people, you need to look for inspiration - but affirmed that the studio was “not in the business” of stealing designs and ideas.