Palworld, an action-adventure survival game from Japanese developer Pocketpair, saw its early access version released on January 19. As one of the more underrated titles coming out this year, there was not much hype surrounding it, but the game exploded in popularity globally.
At the three-day mark, the open-world game Palworld had apparently sold over 5M copies, more than the fastest-selling PlayStation exclusive of all time, The Last of Us Part II. Many outlets had seen the response from players to its early trailers and expected it to be highly favored, but no one saw this kind of early success coming.
Even the developer was not ready, with officials holding an emergency meeting to fix early connection issues as the number of users looking to access the game was way more than anticipated. In fact, as per a post on its official account on X (formerly Twitter), its support team received 50K inquiries that made it "aware of serious bugs" they were fixing.
Such success has ensured that Palworld was the most-watched game since January 19 on Twitch and the fourth most popular one. Even moving the period to the last week, this PC and Xbox offering is in the third and fourth spots on the respective tables.
What has helped Palworld earn such a large following so quickly is its dark and gritty take on one of the most legendary media franchises of all time, Pokemon. The differences lie in how players can utilize these creatures, called Pals, which they can capture or recruit and use in battles or for working at a base to craft supplies and items for use in the field.
Their ability to use weapons, including guns, has also seemingly gotten over hard among the more violence-oriented gamers worldwide, although this has also seen the title receive flak. Many have termed the game — described as a multiplayer monster-collecting game with open-world survival elements — as Pokemon with guns, with numerous users also criticizing the developer for lifting monster designs from the OG Japanese offering from Nintendo.
Nevertheless, having achieved one of the highest concurrent player counts on Steam at more than 1.5M, the game is on track to become one of the breakout ones three weeks into the new year. This figure also makes it the second-most-played paid game in the PC games platforms' history and third overall, behind only an iconic title like Counter-Strike 2.
Twitch chat analytics for Palworld
Between January 19 and January 21, the game was mentioned 57.3K times across the Twitch channels of content creators from its gaming category. Only one word was used enough times that it hit double figures for a percentage share of the total number of mentions, as users typed ‘depresso’ almost 6.2K times, which equates to 10.81%. Two other words, ‘fuack’ and ‘chillet’, were used enough times that they took up more than 5% of the overall chart.
The high for the number of messages with the words Pal(s)/Palworld was January 20, with 189K mentions. The same day also hit the record so far for the maximum number of chat users for these exact terms, at 80.4K.
Most viewed streamers who played Palworld between January 19 and 21
Moving to the most watched Twitch channels by language for Palworld during these three days, the leader was Germany's GRONKH with 652.8K HW. As one of the biggest internet stars in Europe, he is renowned for playing a variety of games from across genres, although Just Chatting remains his favorite category.
German has also been the second most viewed language for the game over the first weekend of its early access with 1.6M HW. English leads this chart by a massive margin, having hit 6.2M HW, with the official channel of Pirate Software, a video game studio run by former Blizzard Entertainment and Amazon Games Studios employee Thor, who is also a game developer and hacker.
With such an exciting start to life, it remains to be seen how well Palworld can sustain this momentum and where it finishes on the list of most successful games this year. For now, players are busy capturing, building, and battling for supremacy.
Streams Charts will keep track of its progress, and readers who want a detailed analysis of Palworld's performances on platforms like Twitch can check out our PRO subscription. We will be also back with more updates on other new releases across 2024.
