Palworld Leaves Early Access and Nearly Breaks 900,000 Players

Palworld left early access with patch 1.0 on July 10 and drew 855,525 concurrent players on Steam the next day, its best turnout since the January 2024 launch. Pocketpair shipped the release with 27 PDF pages of patch notes and no price increase, which it called a small way of saying thank you. The peak put the game back near the top of the Steam charts.

Head of publishing and communications John "Bucky" Buckley marked the numbers on social media.

"I promise I'll try not to just be posting Steam numbers every day but really, thank you so much, gamers. Obviously, we had high expectations for 1.0 internally, but this is staggering."

— John "Bucky" Buckley

Palworld's all-time peak still sits at 2.1 million from its early access debut, a count that beats Counter-Strike 2, Dota 2, and Monster Hunter Wilds. Only Black Myth: Wukong and PUBG have posted higher all-time player counts on Steam. The 1.0 figure lands second among Palworld's own peaks.

Buckley had trailed the update's scale ahead of launch, joking that fitting 27 PDF pages of changes into neat patch notes was breaking him. Known additions include a flight-enabling wing pack and the World Tree, teased in trailers as a narrative piece of what comes next. Players who kept their save files did not have to restart, though Buckley suggested a fresh run anyway.

The response has split between requests for more content and requests for fixes. Some players floated randomized maps, swapped resource nodes, and a sequel. Others pushed back. One Reddit user asked Pocketpair to finish base building and Pal behavior first, citing stability, pathfinding, clipping, and work priorities, and called the current state acceptable for early access but hard to accept for a full release.

The same 1.0 update quietly reworked several creatures. Pocketpair said nothing about it in the changelog, but players flagged the changes fast. At launch, some Pals were near-assemblies of recognizable Pokémon silhouettes and details, often carried over without a palette change. The redesigned Pals pull back from that. Verdash, long tagged as a Cinderace lookalike, now has less humanoid proportions and dropped the matching legwear. Robinquill and Fenglope no longer use the palettes of Decidueye and Cobalion, with detail changes meant to separate them from their doppelgangers. Players tracked the edits on Reddit rather than in any official notes.

I read the timing as the point, since the studio reworked the designs only after the game had already made its millions. PC Gamer's Lincoln Carpenter framed the reworks as a tacit admission that the original creatures were not a model of creative integrity, fixable once the money was in.

The visual changes sit apart from the legal fight. Nintendo and The Pokémon Company sued Pocketpair in Japan in September 2024 over patents covering the throw used to catch a creature and the act of riding one, not over how any Pal looks. I think that distinction is worth holding onto, because the redesigns answer a reputational charge rather than a courtroom one. Pocketpair had already altered the disputed mechanics, pulling the Pal Sphere and reworking gliding in a December 2024 update so players needed an actual glider.

That case has kept shrinking. In November 2025, Nintendo and Pokémon narrowed their claims to older builds of Palworld, the versions that ran before the mechanics were patched out. IP analyst Florian Mueller, a former Blizzard employee, put the maximum recovery at about 5 million yen, roughly $30,000, against an opening demand PC Gamer reported near $66,000.

"This litigation is no longer about anything serious in commercial terms."

— Florian Mueller

Both the Japan Patent Office and the US Patent and Trademark Office have grown skeptical of Nintendo's game-rule applications, and videogame patent lawyer Kirk Sigmon said its newest Pokémon-related patents should never have been granted. Nintendo's most recent annual report logged a $40 million loss from patent litigation. The court will hear evidence on October 1 and give its opinion on November 9, 2026.

None of it has slowed the studio. Palworld took four Steam medals at Steam's Best of 2025 Awards, winning silver for Most Played and Most Played on Steam Deck and bronze for Top Seller and best Controller game, with Hollow Knight: Silksong taking the top prize. Pocketpair marked the result on X and pointed to the 1.0 launch it was already building toward. Communications director Bucky answered years of write-offs directly, thanking the community and calling it "not bad for a dead game." The studio has also treated collaborations as routine, shipping the Palworld X ULTRAKILL crossover on December 17, 2025, its second major team-up after Terraria.

Read also, Pocketpair turned last year's April Fool's gag into a real project. More Than Just Pals, a Palworld dating sim, is now in development and wishlistable on Steam.