Palworld barges Dota 2 aside as PC player counts skyrocket following the game’s 1.0 release
After a long wait, Palworld has finally hit 1.0 on PC and consoles, and while it hasn’t managed to replicate its massive 2.1m concurrent player peak from early 2024, it’s currently one of the most played games on Steam.
At the time of writing, Palworld is second with 489,007 players and an 855,525 one-day peak, behind only Counter-Strike 2. It’s the open-world survival game’s best-ever concurrent player count since it first welcomed players.
Even if Pocketpair’s Pokémon-like survival-crafting game hasn’t gotten close to its early access launch’s figures, it’s a mighty impressive boost for a relaunch, as pointed out by Forbes’ Paul Tassi. “To date, there has never been a similar situation of a relaunch hitting a figure like that, though a few expansions may count for forever-hits like PUBG.” He also underlined that the Asian markets have been boosting its numbers during hours when there’s typically less activity from the United States and Europe.
Notably, Palworld’s current tally puts it above one of Steam’s most consistently popular games: Valve’s Dota 2. Like Counter-Strike 2, Dota 2 is a free-to-play game, whereas Palworld is a premium title, so its success – despite a paid barrier to entry – is considerable.
This might indicate that there was a sizable audience waiting for the Pokémon-inspired sandbox title to exit early access before jumping in. For all the controversies surrounding it – such as the ongoing legal battles with Nintendo, Pocketpair has managed to please most of the community for over two years, which is no small feat if we consider how hard to please players of live service games can be. It could also be argued that Pocketpair deciding against raising the price for the full launch – in combination with a limited-time 30 percent-off deal – might have helped it reach more players.
In Palworld, players fight, farm, build, and work alongside creatures called Pals (not Pokémon) in an open world, which can be explored and exploited alone or online. By September 2025, it had sold over 25m copies. At launch, Eurogamer’s Chris Tapsell wasn’t impressed by Palworld and said it was “a product designed to be sold, rather than to be played”, derivative approach aside.
