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It turns out that Palworld being popular enough to bring in 19 million players means that server costs are pretty high.
Somehow, despite my own reservations about how the game looks, Palworld has managed to hit 19 million players across both Steam and Xbox, 12 million of those players being just Steam, meaning that’s how many copies it’s sold on the PC storefront. It’s a ridiculously high number, and will easily cement it as the most popular independent release of the year, and potentially one of the most successful games of the year overall. But, the price of success is a high one, as demonstrated by Pocketpair CEO Takuro Mizobe.
In a recent tweet from Mizobe, the CEO shared that server costs for the game, which only released January 19, are already 70.53 million Japanese yen, around £376,276/ $475,349. “Wait, maybe they’ll go bankrupt due to server fees?” Mizobe jokingly wrote alongside an image showing off the server costs. That cost isn’t even for a full month of the game being out, so the monthly cost is likely to be even higher come February 19.
Palworld’s lead network engineer Chujo Hiroto also jokingly responded to Mizobe’s tweet, writing “Following the order to never let the service go down no matter what, we have prepared servers without regard to cost. We will continue to give our all to ensure that all players can enjoy to the fullest! $478,000…”
Important to note is that, because Palworld is a one-time purchase, the game doesn’t have anything to bring in a constant revenue stream, unlike an MMO. Plus, while updates are planned, the only DLC the game has currently is a soundtrack. Again, though, 19 million players is likely to have brought in a pretty penny, so I wouldn’t worry too much if I were you.
Pocketpair released the latest patch for Palworld earlier this week, and unfortunately for the Pal-thieves out there, you can’t steal other player’s Pal anymore.