Palworld devs remind people that it’s normal to take a break from a game 

PocketPair’s community manager Bucky addressed a recent slew of articles about Palworld “losing X% of its player base” in a post on X (formerly Twitter) on February 15. In a message to the community, he calls the ongoing discourse lazy, while encouraging players not to feel guilty about putting down the game and enjoying other titles while they wait for new Palworld content. 

Palworld released in Early Access less than a month ago. The release has been a sweeping success, as the game broke records in sales and quickly peaked at 2.1 million concurrent players (via SteamDB), becoming second only to PUBG: Battlegrounds. Since hitting this milestone at the end of January, Palworld has seen a gradual decrease in concurrent players, with recent peaks hovering around the 500k mark. 

This fact resulted in a number of articles about “Palworld losing X% of its player base,” inciting pessimistic discourse about the game’s future. In response to this, PocketPair’s Bucky chimed in to encourage the community to look past the headlines and to remember that taking breaks from games is not something to feel bad about. 

PocketPair has an ambitious roadmap set out for Palworld, planning various future updates such as new islands, Pals, technology, a Pal Arena, PvP and more. However, as Bucky comments, PocketPair is not a company that can afford to pump out new content constantly, so players taking breaks from the game and coming back for more later is a normal outcome.  

Likely due to its massive success, recent reports seem to be holding Palworld to the standard of a large-scale live-service game, hence the concerns about fluctuations in player base, but it’s important to remember that the game is still in Early Access, and that players moving on after exhausting the content currently available is not necessarily a sign of its decline. 

Palworld is available for the PC (Steam), Xbox One and Xbox Series X|S.