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The story
Palworld’s peak number of simultaneous Steam players has plunged from a high of roughly 2.1 million down to just 140,000, becoming a hot topic on 5ch’s “Hardware/Industry (Geha)” board. That works out to a loss of over 90% of peak players in the roughly two months since the 1.0 full release. The thread noted that only three titles in history have ever topped 2 million concurrent Steam players — PUBG, Black Myth: Wukong, and Palworld — and that even a 30% storewide sale hasn’t stopped the slide. Posters were split on whether this is just the natural cooldown of initial hype or a stall caused by the game running out of buzz.
What people said
It's been almost two months now, right?
What a brutal drop lol
If this were a stock price, people would be jumping out of windows lololol
A 300x gap against a game that's two years old… that's honestly kind of sad
Aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaah (´・ω・｀) (a common 5ch emoticon face used to express dismay)
I wish Game Freak would take game development a little more seriously
If it were that much of a hassle they'd just adjust the gathering rate
The balance isn't even so brutal that you'd need to leave it running idle just to farm materials
There are probably also people leveling up accounts to sell them
Check the marketplace sites — there's quite a few sellers
but even restricted to paid, Japanese-made games, there are still plenty of 'chameleons' (games that spike hard then quickly fade)
THAT'S what a genuine boom and trend actually looks like
That's already dead and buried
I mean, free-to-play dominates even on Steam lol
That trend is already over, full stop
Probably back to business as usual by September
Past 5 years
Past 3 months
Looking at other games, basically nothing hits over 2 million right at launch
And at that point it hadn't even been sued yet — it was, for better or worse, 'just another clone game.' The fact that something like that suddenly put up numbers like this is weird
There are other games that hit over 2 million concurrent right out of the gate too, like Black Myth: Wukong
Does that mean existing players are leaving faster than new ones are joining?
Yep, exactly
It sold on being a clone, but it's boring, so people are leaving
About 2 months
And here's another gut punch!
Palworld
Metascore: 78
User score: 7.3
Dead game, dead game, lmaooo!!!!!! lol lol lol lmaooo!!!!!!
Claiming this isn't a ghost town is just way too big a stretch 🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣
That said, only three titles in history have ever topped 2 million concurrent — PUBG, Black Myth: Wukong, and Palworld
Well, it's holding up better than Black Myth: Wukong, at least.
Makes sense — it's a Pokémon clone, after all.
Though honestly, what really stands out here is how amazing Pokémon's numbers are and how rock-solid PUBG's are
Pokémon's genre listing
is filed as "computer game,"
so that figure lumps in mobile, Switch, everything combined
Come back once you've narrowed it down to just Scarlet/Violet or the spin-off titles
Losing 90% of players in about two months and then fading into total irrelevance… so the 1.0 full release basically just reran the same old episode
Same downward slope as before, right, Re: #89
Even back in Early Access, it stopped being talked about from around this same point too
what does that make everything below that number…
Are you trying to pick a fight with 99% of the games on Japanese Steam?
If you factor in that it's a paid, buy-once game, then every title except Palworld and Black Myth: Wukong ends up looking like garbage by comparison
Even now it normally runs 1–1.5 million concurrent
and easily clears 2 million during updates
That's an AI-generated summary, isn't it
The kind that mixes PS5 numbers in with everything else
It comes up repeatedly in Epic's financial and court filings — the main battlefield is overwhelmingly PlayStation
It's died down on PC
That's why they can't accept the Metascore and keep bumping the thread over it, and why they swarm into threads like this whining "it's still popular, nobody's bored of it" lol
I wouldn't say flawless and invincible, but it is getting overwhelmingly positive reviews and praise from people who actually bought it
That's just employees doing their jobs diligently
Exactly
Feels like while everyone was busy brawling over this in Japan, the real threat showed up from outside
Can't rule it out — there's precedent, like with Genshin Impact
Both of those are Pokémon clones too lol
The reason those two don't get as much noise is probably that their real rival is Palworld, not Pokémon
Over there, people were making a huge fuss calling it a ripoff, to the point Palworld had to put out an official statement
Background and Key Points of This Discussion
It’s worth remembering that Steam’s concurrent player count is just a rough platform-level gauge, separate from official metrics like total sales. Palworld has been a subject of debate over its similarity to Pokémon ever since launch, but the Metacritic user score of 7.3 cited in the thread isn’t actually a low number — so a decline in concurrent players doesn’t necessarily mean the game itself is being rated poorly. It’s also worth noting that major titles not distributed via Steam, such as Fortnite, aren’t part of this concurrent-player comparison, which limits how meaningful a simple cross-platform comparison can be. What split opinion in the thread was purely the interpretation behind the decline — no objective supporting data, like sales figures, was actually presented.
※This article is compiled as an excerpt/summary of the 5ch (Hardware/Industry (Geha)) thread “[Sad News] Palworld’s Concurrent Players Down to Just 140,000… It’s a Total Ghost Town Now”.
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