Palworld is now the most-played third-party game on Xbox Game Pass

It was a huge deal for Palworld to surpass Counter-Strike 2 on Steam in all-time peak and active players, and now it’s broken another record. Xbox announced Wednesday that the early access open-world survival game has become the biggest third-party Xbox Game Pass launch in the service’s history.

Palworld has raked in more than 7 million players across Xbox and Windows PC, peaking at nearly 3 million active daily users.

Pocketpair CEO Takuro Mizobe told Xbox Wire, “The response from fans has been tremendous and it’s incredible to see the millions of players around the world enjoying Palworld. This is just the beginning for us and Palworld and the feedback we’re gathering while in Game Preview will allow us to continue to improve the experience for Pal Tamers across all platforms.”

Xbox and Pocketpair are also working on optimizing the game for Xbox platforms, including implementing cross-play. The Xbox Wire article says the team is “working quickly to address it.”

On Monday, gaming website True Achievements announced that Palworld had dethroned Fortnite as the most popular game on Xbox on its Xbox Chart (Fortnite is still in the top spot on the Microsoft website).

“Fortnite has held the top spot since pretty much the dawn of time, backed up by Minecraft and CoD or GTA V in second or third, and it’s highly unusual to see anything change this line-up — but Palworld has done it,” Heidi Nicholas at True Achievements wrote.

This is probably not a huge surprise for anyone who’s been watching the game since it was released in early access. It’s consistently held onto Steam’s top concurrent player list. It also sold more than 8 million copies in under a week. A Pockepair spokesperson announced Wednesday in a press release that Palworld had attracted over 19 million players across PC and Xbox.

The allure of Palworld is easy to understand: People have been buzzing about the game because of its similarities to Pokémon, but the game goes much, much deeper. Behind the Pokémon with guns hype, Palworld is more about survival and crafting than Pokémon, borrowing from games like Ark.