What is Palworld, and why is it suddenly the most popular game in the world?

PC gaming storefront and distribution platform Steam is usually a pretty stable place. You look at its charts, and you see the usual suspects up there at the top, week after week, month after month, and in the case of its most enduringly popular titles like Counter-Strike and PUBG Battlegrounds, year after year.

You rarely see a new game break into the pantheon of Steam’s top five most played. Once every few years, perhaps. And you absolutely never see an indie game, without a publisher attached to it or any kind of Western marketing, pull it off. Ladies and gentlemen, please welcome to the stage: Palworld.

The biggest game of 2024 by some margin, it’s the creation of Japanese indie studio Pocketpair. At the time of writing, there are 1.2 million people playing it. That’s about twice as many as the second-most played game on Steam currently, Counter-Strike 2. As in, yes, actual flipping Counter-Strike. The one that sells out arenas with its esports tournaments, and that’s been around in various forms for 24 years. There are about 600,000 people playing that right now.

For Palworld to be sitting at the top of that chart is akin to Leicester winning the Premier League in 2016, if the players had all entered into a gentlemen’s agreement never to break into a full sprint all season. And vowed to only score from headers.

Quick question then: what on Earth’s going on?

As far as anyone can tell so far, this isn’t a victory for some particularly insidious viral marketing campaign or a massive paid media assault. Gamers haven’t been spammed by Palworld pre-roll ads like they were for Raid: Shadow Legends. Instead, it appears Pocketpair simply hit on a formula people actually want to play, and good old fashioned word of mouth - and popularity-adjusted storefront algorithms - did the rest.

Palworld is an open-world survival game with crafting and combat elements. There are cutely animated monsters you can capture in little balls, train and then battle against other captured monsters.

You can also use these ‘Pals’ to work on factory assembly lines and in farms to make your survival that bit easier. You can go dungeon-crawling with them, use them as mounts to explore overground, and breed Pals to create new variants.

If that doesn’t sound like the kind of premise that would set the gaming world on fire, and made you think of several other titles that offer exactly the same, that’s sort of the point. It’s not just what Palworld does, it’s the way it does it. Specifically: the mashup of other games that it brings to mind.

So if you were to put it in another way and say: it’s Pokemon with guns, set in Breath of the Wild’s open world, would it make more sense that Palworld is world-eatingly popular?

And this is where things get tricky about Palworld. Because to some people, the resemblances to those games aren’t just passing. The Pokemon Company released a statement this week announcing that its investigating any IP infringements relating to Pokemon, in reference to Palworld.

“We have received many inquiries regarding another company’s game released in January 2024. We have not granted any permission for the use of Pokémon intellectual property or assets in that game.

“We intend to investigate and take appropriate measures to address any acts that infringe on intellectual property rights related to the Pokémon. We will continue to cherish and nurture each and every Pokémon and its world, and work to bring the world together through Pokémon in the future.

"Whatever the outcome of those legal investigations, Palworld’s popularity right now forces the games industry to consider the line between inspiration and plagiarism. Before Soulslikes became commonplace, the defining traits of FromSoftware’s Dark Souls RPGs were very clear and so esoteric that it would be hard to imagine another studio ‘getting away’ with using them. Well over a decade later, saving at bonfires and dropping your XP upon death have become genre conventions found in countless games.

What’s so different about a game taking the idea of capturable, trainable pets and exploring it outside the Pokemon IP? In this case, it’s probably the air of edginess that Palworld has about it. While Nintendo’s official Pokemon releases have always been careful not to draw your attention to the fact you’re essentially enslaving wildlife and training it to fight for your amusement, Palworld seems to revel in exactly that. Pals fight to the death here, not just until PG-rated unconsciousness. They work assembly lines in player-created factories. And there are guns. Pokemon with guns. If anything’s going to prompt an army of laywers to mobilise, it’s that.

Oh, and the game itself? Not great. It’s an Early Access release on Steam in fairness, which means it’s a playable work-in-progress. But it’s lacking any particular mechanical polish, a new gameplay loop or a distinctive take on the survival genre that might make its popularity seem obvious and inevitable. Still, there’s cause for positivity here. Palworld reminds us all that however much we might spend on influencer campaigns, inescapable ads, ARGs or publicity stunts, in the end it’s still good ideas that sell games.