Palworld’s success led to Xbox’s best month ever
More than 10 million players on Xbox spent time with the Game Preview title from Pocketpair, leading to a new record for the console.
When you purchase through links on our site, we may earn an affiliate commission.Here’s how it works.
What you need to know
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 anews 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 ontracking 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 theDeveloper Acceleration Program. These programs, along with a newly available pitch portal, give more independent developers greater access to pitch games to be considered forXbox Game Passdeals and additional porting and publishing support.
Get the Windows Central Newsletter
All the latest news, reviews, and guides for Windows and Xbox diehards.
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.
