The hit game Palworld is now officially available on PlayStation 5

This rumor has been around for months, but it wasn't until today, during Sony's State of Play event, that developer PocketPair officially announced that Palworld is now available on the PlayStation 5 console.

The PS5 launch trailer for Palworld has given PS5 gamers a glimpse of what to expect from the game. Palworld's availability on PlayStation 5 is the result of a long-standing agreement between Sony Music and PocketPair. Back in July, the two companies announced they would be joining forces to form Palworld Entertainment. The plan is to expand the Palworld brand beyond video games and PCs, including toys and accessories.

What is Palworld?

Palworld is an Early Access survival game produced by Japanese indie game company Pocketpair. In other words, Palworld is an open world, survival, building and collecting game, with graphics designed in a similar style to the famous Pokemon franchise.

Palworld features “pals”; monsters that you can catch and collect. The game has gotten a lot of attention for its resemblance to Pokémon, but its open-world survival approach makes it more of a Pokémon simulation game. You won’t have trouble spotting the similarities between the games, from the cute and colorful nature of the pals to the way you capture and arrange them in a “Paldeck.” But there’s more to the game than just catching pals.

The game takes inspiration from a variety of genres and you can see similarities to Satisfactory in the ability to create automated assembly lines for weapons, farming and building. There are also clear inspirations from Ark: Survival Evolved or Rust in the way the world looks and feels.

Your pals don't just fight and feed, they also have jobs. Some pals can help you smelt metals, cook, water plants, and even craft items. There's a whole job system that you can take advantage of to turn your base into a productive empire that relies on the power of your pals.

The game supports both single-player and multiplayer. You can play alone in your own world or with up to 4 players on a personally hosted server. You can also join official or community servers with up to 32 players.

Over 3 million copies sold in 40 hours, reaching 1 million concurrent players on Steam

According to Pocket Pair, on the first day of its launch on January 19, Palworld immediately became the center of attention in the gaming community. On the online game distribution platform Steam, the game quickly sold more than 1 million copies after only 8 hours of release, 2 million copies in the first 24 hours. By the end of Saturday, about 40 hours after its release, Palworld had reached the milestone of more than 3 million copies sold worldwide, an extremely impressive number.

Not stopping there, as of now, the game has reached a milestone of over 1 million concurrent players on Valve's Steam platform. It is currently the most played game on Steam, beating out the equally popular Counter-Strike 2. Statistics from SteamDB.info show that Palworld is currently the sixth most played game on Steam of all time, in terms of concurrent players. In addition, Palworld's positive review rate on Steam is also very high, up to 93%.

It seems that the game's initial issues with servers being overloaded due to the surge of players trying to log in have improved significantly. This is likely because Pocket Pair required Epic Games to update its backend to accommodate the large number of players.

Since its launch, Palworld has quickly become a surprise sales hit for both Xbox and PC platforms when it first launched in January 2024. Just a month after the game's launch, PocketPair said that 25 million gamers have played the game. Of those, 15 million are on Steam and 10 million are on Xbox consoles. That number is likely to continue to grow as PlayStation console players get to experience the game.