The surprisingly great success of Palworld, which attracts players in droves, also has a downside: the server capacities required are huge – and that in turn leads to seemingly ridiculous server costs!
Within a week of Palworld’s early access or game preview launch on PC and Xbox, the survival game, which is known to have strong similarities between Pals and Pokémon, has attracted a whopping 19 million players – an incredibly good figure ! The game is the title of the moment on both platforms, but it also requires huge server capacities to meet the great interest.
This has largely worked quite well so far – and given the surprising success, that’s quite remarkable considering how other developers and publishers of well-known titles had to struggle with problems at launch. However, this also has its price, as Takuro Mizobe from developer PocketPair now emphasizes via social media.
In a tweet, he published a picture of the server costs for the game – and they have already amounted to 70.53 million yen since its release on January 19, 2024. That’s the equivalent of just over 475,000 US dollars – and that in just over two weeks! For a whole month, the costs for the required servers at the current level would roughly level out at almost a million dollars. Insanity!
Wait, maybe they’ll go bankrupt due to server fees? pic.twitter.com/ahxYHM3zWl
— Takuro Mizobe | Craftopia, Palworld (@urokuta_ja) February 2, 2024
In view of the impending legal disputes with Nintendo and The Pokémon Company over possible Pokémon copyright infringement, Mizobe is already joking about the server costs: “Wait a minute, maybe they will go bankrupt because of the server costs?”
Chujo Hiroto, Palworld’s Lead Network Engineer, also took up Mizobe’s tweet and emphasized: “We follow the instruction to never let the service collapse, no matter what it takes. We have prepared the servers without considering any costs. We will continue to do everything we can to ensure that all players can fully enjoy it! $478,000…”
It remains to be seen how the hype and player numbers around Palworld will develop in the future. Unlike MMOs that charge monthly fees, without free-to-play titles with constant revenue thanks to in-game and microtransactions, Palworld is a one-time fee title. After the initial purchase by the user in the current model, there is not necessarily a lot of additional money for the developers; In the long term, high server costs could become a problem if sales of the game itself begin to saturate.
Have you ever wondered what would make the little monsters from Pokémon even more cuddly? That’s right, a fully automatic assault rifle. That’s exactly what the developers at Palworld thought. Felix looked at the hype title. Have fun!
