Pokémon-style survival game Palworld is a huge hit, with 2m players in 24 hours

Pokémon-style survival game Palworld launched its early access version on Friday and is already a huge hit.

According to the game’s developer, Pocketpair, the game exceeded 2 million sales in its first 24 hours, with the number of concurrent players exceeding 700,000.

This places Palworld in Steam’s top ten all-time biggest games, in terms of concurrent players, above the likes of Apex Legends, Call of Duty, Among Us and Grand Theft Auto V.

Pocketpair said the huge launch forced it to hold an “emergency meeting” with Epic Games to resolve a connectivity error issue the demand was causing when hosting co-op games on Xbox and PC.

“You should notice an improvement in connectivity and the errors should start to disappear shortly,” it said on social media. “Thank you for your continued support of Palworld.”

Palworld is described by its creator as an “action-adventure survival game” in which players can battle and capture Pals in order to use them 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.

Despite its drastically different tone and game style, it hasn’t gone unnoticed that many of its 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.