Palworld: ‘Pokémon with guns’ sells 5m copies in three days

The makers of an online multiplayer game dubbed “Pokémon with guns” say it’s sold five million copies in three days.

Palworld, from Japanese company Pocketpair, has been an overnight success since it launched on Friday.

But its surprising popularity meant players struggled to log on at times due to server crashes.

The game’s also been criticised as a Pokémon rip-off due to the similarity of its creatures.

Palworld is described as a “multiplayer monster-collecting game with open-world survival elements”.

Players, known as “pal-tamers” travel around a large map battling human foes and creatures known as “pals” which can be captured and recruited.

The monsters can either fight alongside the player in battles, or be put to work at a base, crafting supplies and items for use in the field.

At its peak, the game reported almost 1.3 million concurrent players via Steam, according to tracker website Steamdb, and the team behind it had to hold an emergency meeting to fix early connection issues.

Wesley Yin-Poole, UK News Editor for gaming website IGN, said early interest in the game “gave us an indication that it was going to be very popular, but no one expected it to be as popular as it has proven over the weekend”.

He said Pocketpair is a small developer “with a few games under its belt, but nothing explosively popular like this”.

“The Last of Us Part Two sold four million copies in three days. Palworld has sold faster than the fastest-selling PlayStation exclusive of all time, the success is astronomical.

“It just goes to show that this sort of genre is immensely popular and, personally, I’m just surprised it’s taken this long for someone to do something like this.”