“Pokemon With Guns” Crafting Game Palworld Crosses 4 Million Early Access Sales In Three Days

Last week, developer PocketPair released Palworld on Steam, an open-world survival crafting game with monster taming elements, with the collectable “Pals” bearing strong resemblance to creatures featured in the Pokemon series.

During its promotional period, fans often called the game “Pokemon with guns” due to the heavy emphasis on firearms in the trailers, offering ways to interact with cute critters the iconic franchise had never really allowed. In addition to emulating Pokemon‘s aesthetic for its monsters, Palworld also combines elements from many other popular open-world games, with The Legend Of Zelda: Breath Of The Wild, and Ark: Survival Evolved being among the more obvious influences.

PocketPair’s approach to the game evidently payed off in spades, as Palworld managed to achieve 4 million downloads within three days of its Early Access launch. By comparison, this figure is very close to the first global sales figures for Pokemon Sworld/Shield (6 Million), although still far away from that of the open-world Pokemon Scarlet/Violet (10 Million). Palworld also has the honor of having the highest peak player count on Steam of all time at over 1.2 million users, surpassing that of Cyberpunk 2077 (around 1 million).

Despite these figures, the game has received its fair share of criticism online, ranging from the blatant lifting of popular mechanics from other games, accusations that Pals were generated using AI or copied wholesale from existing Pokemon, as well as the numerous bugs and issues that come with an Early Access title. Only time will tell whether these problems will eventually halt the game’s momentum, although it doesn’t look to be slowing significantly any time soon.

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