There’s only been one paid game, ever, more popular than Palworld on Steam

Palworld has very quickly proven successful, shooting up the rankings of Steam's top played games, leaving it behind only one other paid game in terms of player count.

Who could have guessed that if you took a Pokemon-like creature collecting game, threw in some guns and survival elements, you'd get a hit game? Probably a lot of people, actually, though just how rapidly Palworld is finding success is still a bit surprising. Over the weekend, Palworld hit three million copies sold in the space of 40 hours, except that's already wrong, as the official Palworld Twitter has now shared it's hit five million copies sold in three days. That popularity has proven to bring in a ton of players all at once on Steam too, with Palworld now being the second most played paid game of all time - the only other paid game above it being PUBG: Battlegrounds (via SteamDB).

Just to clarify, while PUBG is now a free-to-play title, it achieved its all-time concurrent player peak of 3,257,248 when it was a premium game, which is why it still holds the top spot of the most concurrently played games. Palworld is quite a bit behind that, with an all-time concurrent player count peak of 1,291,967, but it's still an impressive feat when you consider its beaten out massive games like Cyberpunk 2077, Elden Ring, and Baldur's Gate 3. If you include free-to-play games, the only titles ahead of it are Dota 2, Lost Ark, and Counter-Strike 2, so Palworld really isn't doing all that bad.

While it might be doing incredibly well, there have been some accusations of plagiarism placed against it, outside of the surface-level "it looks like Pokemon with guns" comments. Various comparisons have been made between some of Palworld's creature designs and Pokemon's, and there certainly are a few that might raise some eyebrows. It's impossible to prove without any kind of direct confirmation, of course, but it has put off some from playing the game.

Palworld is out now, and is available to play on PC, Xbox One, and Xbox Series X/S, and you can play it via Game Pass too.