Palworld, a Pokémon-style survival game, launched its early access version on Friday and immediately became a huge hit, exceeding 2 million sales in its first 24 hours.
The number of concurrent players exceeded 700,000, placing Palworld in Steam’s top ten all-time biggest games, above the likes of Apex Legends, Call of Duty, Among Us, and Grand Theft Auto V.
The huge launch forced the game’s developer, Pocketpair, to hold an “emergency meeting” with Epic Games to resolve a connectivity error issue caused by the high demand when hosting co-op games on Xbox and PC.
Palworld is an “action-adventure survival game” where players can battle and capture Pals for base building, traversal, and combat. However, the game’s prominent use of firearms, which can be equipped to Pals, earned it the internet nickname, “Pokémon with guns”.
Controversially, players can also eat their companions or put them to work in factories, adding a drastically different tone and game style to the game.
Despite its unique style, it hasn’t gone unnoticed that many of Palworld’s monster designs bear striking similarities to that of the Nintendo series. On X, one user has collated all the designs perceived to have been based on Pokémon.
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