It takes an incredible amount of hype or a game of amazing quality to take on the greats on the Steam concurrent chart, and despite many trying, few have claimed the top spot over Valve’s behemoth FPS Counter-Strike. Well, we can now add a new title to that esteemed list—Palworld.
Pocketpair’s Pal-slaying survival game continues to shatter records just over a day on from its release, briefly knocking Counter-Strike 2 down and taking the number one spot on Steam’s concurrent list according to SteamDB on Jan. 20. Palworld peaked at 855,706 players in its first full day, a remarkable feat for the Early Access title. CS2 would reclaim its spot after a couple of hours but with more players entering the world by the hour, the survival game is here to stay.
Counter-Strike’s top spot on the Steam concurrent player list has been nigh impenetrable for years. PUBG’s slow decline and Dota 2’s plateau outside of TI season has meant CS:GO and CS2 have gone untouched at the top, for four years. Only Lost Ark snuck home to claim the peak concurrent listing back in February 2022.
CS2’s 23-month streak at the top is at an end for the moment though as Palworld fever sweeps the world. Within just eight hours, the game sold over a million copies and climbed straight onto the servers. CS2’s lead looked shaky early as Palworld rose through the concurrent list but only crossed the historic mark once the majority of North America woke on Saturday morning.
Despite a little backlash from some passionate Pokémon fans who claim Pocketpair has ripped off the franchise and a few technical hiccups along the way, Palworld launched fairly smoothly across all platforms. Reception has been great and word-of-mouth will assuredly push Palworld’s playerbase even higher as the weekend continues.
We definitely aren’t expecting anything like PUBG’s ridiculous 3.2 million concurrent record to be broken here, but with the game building such a healthy player base this early into its lifespan, Palworld won’t be going anywhere anytime soon. Pocketpair has already revealed plans for a PvP arena and more raids, and we can also expect more fixes for the few annoying bugs that are affecting players in the coming week.
Update Jan. 21 at 12:32am CT: On the stroke of midnight, Palworld cracked the almighty one million concurrent mark, becoming the sixth game to hit seven-digit concurrents on Steam behind Counter-Strike 2, PUBG, Dota 2, Lost Ark, and Cyberpunk 2077. Amazingly it crossed the mark very late for North American players, meaning its final launch weekend player count is expected to rise further on Sunday.
