Palworld Global Community Manager on Its Quick Launch: ‘We Absolutely Panicked’
When the little one Palworld team, based in Japan, greenlit the game on January 19, 2024 – successfully granting early access to the gaming public – developers gathered around the office vending machine to celebrate. Immediately the players poured in. It was an instant success. The group saw the numbers rise: ten thousand, twenty thousand, fifty thousand, one hundred thousand. “Then a few developers had to go back to their desks because things started to get a little shaky,” global community manager John “Bucky” Buckley told Polygon in December.
And the numbers kept rising – quickly. Two hundred thousand, three hundred thousand, five hundred thousand. The Palworld team had to make a statement on X, Japan shortly before midnight time to instruct players to log in a few times or wait a moment to log in after the game starts; the servers were unstable due to the sheer amount of people trying to play. “It kept happening all night,” Buckley said. “And there was a point, especially after midnight because some of us had gone home and lived far away, when the servers broke. That was about a million.”
Somewhere in the chaos, Epic Games (where the online servers were hosted) reached out to help stabilize things. In the following days, the game surpassed 2 million players on Steam alone. It dethroned Fortnite on Xbox. “All of our multiplayer capabilities started getting weird, dropping out and crashing,” Buckley said. “It was an intense slowdown, but Epic was great. They allocated more resources and helped us very quickly.”
It was help that was desperately needed: Pocketpair had one server guy at the time Palworld launched. A server guy who was 21 or 22 years old at the time – Buckley joked that he was aging quickly in the first few days. “He did his best,” Buckley said. As a team, Pocketpair had approximately 35 people working Palworldincluding third party developers. The server issues naturally trickled down to community management as well: “We had to streamline our bug reporting system because it wasn’t very good at launch,” Buckley said. “The support was messy.”
With help, the servers eventually stabilized, despite Palworld‘s player numbers remain consistently high. Palworld For days into February, there were more than 1 million concurrent players. “I don’t think we dropped below 100,000 until April,” Buckley said. Palworld has consistently had a five-figure player base until the end of December 2024, with the six figures occasionally being used for updates, due to the Palworld Feybreak expansion, which once again gave the game a six-figure player count.
I spoke to Polygon in December, ahead of the Feybreak During the announcement at The Game Awards in Los Angeles, Buckley explained what the team learned from the launch. “We definitely panicked more than we should have,” Buckley said. ‘There was no need to spend as many nights as we did. And I wish I reached out to other people for advice sooner.
He continued: “You get caught up in it, especially when there’s a wind of negative sentiment blowing from players, even though it’s 100% valid and they’re right. It is very overwhelming when the responses pour in.”
The big lesson? No “ego-seeking” or “egosa,” as it’s called in Japan — don’t look for the game on social media, Buckley said. You pay attention to feedback reports and bugs, but the developers don’t need to see everything. The level of success Palworld Achieving it in such a short time – before the game has even been fully released – is something that not many developers and studios have experienced or will experience.
There’s a lot on the horizon for Pocketpair and Palworld on the way to release 1.0. (There’s no timing on that.) Part of Pocketpair’s future will involve dealing with a lawsuit filed in Japan by The Pokémon Company and Nintendo for patent infringement regarding the way Pal Spheres work – too close to Poké Balls, the lawsuit alleges – and other details. The expectation is that the legal procedure will proceed slowly, but Pocketpair has recently updated this Palworld that changes how Pals are drafted, something people have speculated is related to the lawsuit. (Buckley declined to comment, but said Pocketpair would eventually explain these changes to players.)