The release of Palworld is one of the biggest game releases in the world, which no one would have expected in advance. But the start almost turned into a disaster.
How did the launch of Palworld go? Even though some trailers had already gained a lot of popularity before the game’s release, no one knew how many players would actually end up playing the much-titled “Pokémon with a gun.”
Ultimately, at the peak time shortly after the release there were more than 2.1 million gamers at the same time (via SteamDB). A number that surprised even the developers themselves, as an interview with Polygon.com by community manager John “Bucky” Buckley showed.
Here you can see the trailer for the last big update from Palworld:
Palworld: Feybreak – Trailer presents a free update with tons of new content
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One employee for 2.1 million players
How could the crowds of players be tamed? As player numbers continued to increase after the release, developers had to come back to the office after work and on weekends. Because all of the developers’ online services gradually collapsed under the heavy load of players.
Other developers like those from Path of Exile 2, who had to expand their support teams due to the rush, also know this.
While the majority of players probably played on independently hosted servers or offline, Palworld already offered official servers back then. These were completely overloaded by the many players. There were also other online services that Palworld needed to function.
However, the developers only had a single employee for the servers who tried to keep the infrastructure running for the more than two million players.
“He did his best,” Community Manager Buckley said of the employee. Of the rest of the team, he said: “We definitely panicked more than we should have. We shouldn’t have had to work as many night shifts as we did. And I wish I had asked other people for advice sooner.”
How did the developers finally manage it? The publication of Palworld was almost a catastrophe due to the limited personnel and technical capacity. However, rescue came in the form of Epic Games.
The company helped the Palworld developers and saved them from disaster. Buckley said: “All of our multiplayer features started getting weird, crashing and failing. There was a lot of intense delays, but Epic was great. They were very quick to provide us with more resources and help us.”
The individual employee would probably not have been able to defend the servers from the hordes of gamers alone. However, the company should now be able to count on how many players want to play their game. By the way, Palworld’s new update caused a rush again: Palworld suddenly has 10 times more players on Steam after its new update