'Palworld 1.0' (Image: Pocketpair)
Palworld has pulled off something Steam has rarely — if ever — seen: landing on the platform’s list of best-ever concurrent player counts twice with the same game.
The original Palworld launch reached 2.1 million concurrent players on Steam, which still ranks as the third-highest peak in the platform’s history, trailing only PUBG and Black Myth: Wukong. Now, after roughly two and a half years in Early Access, the game has released its 1.0 version — a “true” release incorporating years of updates plus its largest patch yet.
That relaunch has notched 725,000 concurrent players on Steam this past weekend, a number boosted by activity in Asian markets during U.S. morning hours. That figure is enough to place Palworld 1.0 at #15 on Steam’s all-time launch concurrent peak list — meaning Palworld now occupies two spots on the same top-15 chart, at #3 and #15.
This kind of “relaunch” hitting numbers on that scale is essentially unprecedented, though looser comparisons like expansion-driven spikes for PUBG, or CS2‘s organic evolution from CS:GO.
Top of the list, per the article: PUBG (3.2M), Black Myth: Wukong (2.4M), Palworld (2.1M), Counter-Strike 2 (1.8M), Monster Hunter: Wilds (1.38M) — down through Battlefield 6 (745K) at #14 and Palworld 1.0 (725K) at #15.
Developer Pocketpair reportedly said the numbers far exceeded expectations — nightly players jumped from around 35,000 pre-launch to 700,000. The article notes this isn’t purely new sales, since many players already owned the game, and Pocketpair kept the 1.0 price unchanged from Early Access.
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