After recovering from the "supernatural" success of Palworld's early access launch, Pocketpair comms and publishing lead John Buckley had more modest expectations for the 1.0 update.

If the game had hit 200,000 concurrent players with 1.0, less than 10% of Palworld's launch peak, "that'd be party time," he says. Instead, Palworld 1.0 rocketed straight to 960,000 concurrents on Steam alone, and about five times Buckley's expectations globally. Before 1.0, the game was hovering around the 45,000 CCU mark on Steam.

Speaking with GamesRadar+ at Gamescom, Buckley examines the "huge success" of Palworld 1.0. "Thank you, gamers," he says. "As cliche as it might sound, we didn't expect it to go that well. Genuinely. 900,000 CCU, insane amount of sales yet again. We're really, really happy. Again, very life changing for the studio."

When we spoke to Buckley earlier in the year at GDC, he described Palworld's launch as an anomaly that he couldn't explain. So, the folks at Pocketpair didn't want to bank on lightning striking twice.

He still seems perplexed by it. "The early access release was supernatural," he reiterates. "It's the only word you can use. It shouldn't exist, that kind of level."

0 would see a healthy wave of returning players who "haven't played in two years" coming back to check out the new stuff. What he and the team didn't expect was for the wave of players buying and playing the game for the first time to be so large.

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