The release of Palworld is one of the biggest game releases in the world, something no one expected beforehand. However, the launch nearly 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 play the much-touted “Pokémon with guns” in the end.
Ultimately, at peak times shortly after the release, there were more than 2.1 million gamers playing simultaneously (via SteamDB). A number that even surprised the developers themselves, as shown in an interview of Community Manager John “Bucky” Buckley with Polygon.com.
Here you can see the trailer for the last major update of Palworld:
One staff member for 2.1 million players
How could the massive influx of players be managed? As the player numbers continued to rise after the release, the developers had to return to the office after their work hours and on weekends. All of the developers’ online services gradually collapsed under the heavy player load.
Other developers, like those of Path of Exile 2, also had to expand their support teams due to the influx.
While a large part of the players were likely playing on self-hosted servers or offline, Palworld had already offered official servers at that time. These were completely overwhelmed by the many players. There were also other online services that Palworld needed to function.
However, for the servers, the developers only had a single employee who tried to keep the infrastructure running for more than two million players.
“He did his best,” said Community Manager Buckley about the employee. About the rest of the team, he remarked: “We definitely panicked more than we should have. We shouldn’t have had to pull as many night shifts as we did. And I wish I had consulted other people earlier.”
How did the developers ultimately succeed? The release of Palworld was nearly a disaster due to the few personnel and technical capacities. However, the rescue came in the form of Epic Games.
The company stepped in to assist the Palworld developers and saved them from disaster. Buckley states: “All our multiplayer features started acting weird, crashing, and failing. There was a lot of intense lag, but Epic was great. They quickly provided us with more resources and helped us.”
Alone, the single employee probably couldn’t have defended the servers against the hordes of gamers. Meanwhile, the company should now be able to estimate how many players want to play their game. By the way, the new update of Palworld caused another surge: Palworld suddenly has 10 times more players on Steam after its new update
