Palworld Global Community Manager on its massive launch and server issues

When little Palworld The team, based in Japan, greenlit the game on January 19, 2024, successfully bringing the game into early access. The developers gathered around the office vending machine to celebrate. The players immediately began to arrive. It was an instant success. The group watched the numbers grow: ten thousand, twenty thousand, fifty thousand, one hundred thousand. “That’s when a few developers had to go back to their desks because things were getting a little shaky,” global community manager John “Bucky” Buckley told Polygon in December.

And their numbers continued to grow, and quickly. Two hundred thousand, three hundred thousand, five hundred thousand. Palworld the team had to issue a statement on X shortly before midnight Japan time, instructing players to try to log in multiple times or wait a bit to log in after launching the game; the servers were unstable due to the huge number of people trying to play. “It went on all night,” Buckley said. “And there was a point, definitely after midnight, because some of us who lived far away went home and the servers crashed. It was about a million.”

Somewhere in this chaos, Epic Games (who hosted the online servers) contacted us to help stabilize the situation. Over the next few days, the number of players on Steam alone exceeded 2 million. He overthrew Fortnite on Xbox. “All of our multiplayer capabilities started acting weird, disconnecting and crashing,” Buckley said. “It was a big lag, but Epic was amazing. They were very quick to give us more resources and help.”

This was help that was desperately needed: Pocketpair had one server specialist when Palworld launched. One server guy, who was 21 or 22 at the time, Buckley joked that he aged quickly in the first few days. “He tried his best,” Buckley said. The Pocketpair team consisted of about 35 people. Palworldincluding external developers. The server issues, of course, affected community management: “We had to optimize our bug reporting system because it wasn’t very good when we launched,” Buckley said. “The support was dirty.”

With the help of servers eventually stabilized, despite PalworldThe number of players remains consistently high. Palworld held over 1 million concurrent players in the days leading up to February. “I don’t think we’ll get below 100,000 until, I want to say, April,” Buckley said. Palworld consistently had a five-figure concurrent player base, occasionally returning to six figures for updates, until the end of December 2024 due to Palworld Fairbreak expansion which again increased the game’s player count to six figures.

Speaking to Polygon in December, before Fairbreak At The Game Awards in Los Angeles, Buckley revealed what the team learned after launch. “We definitely panicked more than we should have,” Buckley said. “I didn’t have to pull as many nights as we did. And I would like to quickly turn to other people for advice.”

He continued: “You get sucked into it, especially when there’s a wind of negativity blowing from players, even if it’s 100% true and they’re right. It’s very overwhelming when the comments flood in.”

Big lesson? No “ego searching,” or “egos” as they call it in Japan—don’t look for the game on social media, Buckley said. You pay attention to reviews and bugs, but developers don’t need to see everything. Success rate Palworld achieved in such a short period of time – before the game was even fully released – is something not many developers and studios have experienced or will experience.

On the horizon for Pocketpair and Palworld approaching release 1.0. (There’s no exact timeline for that.) Part of Pocketpair’s future will include addressing a lawsuit filed in Japan by The Pokémon Company and Nintendo for patent infringement related to the way Pal Spheres work—too close to Poké Balls, the lawsuit claims— and other details. The trial is expected to move slowly, but Pocketpair recently updated Palworld this changes the way buddies are called, and people have speculated that this is related to the lawsuit. (Buckley declined to comment, but said Pocketpair would eventually explain these changes to players.)