A year later, Palworld hits 32m players while continuing to fight off Nintendo

It's been a little bit over a year now since Palworld arrived in Early Access, with developer Pocketpair announcing how well it's done along with another patch out now. ICYMI: Pocketpair recently launched Pocketpair Publishing.

Speaking on Bluesky the Palworld account revealed "It's been a year since Palworld was released, and thanks to you our fans, Palworld has surpassed over 32 million players across all platforms! (Steam, Xbox, PS5)". A truly incredible number but not particularly surprising given all the attention on it, especially with the ongoing lawsuit with Nintendo / The Pokémon Company.

Palworld version v0.4.15 was also just released:

Palworld version v0.4.15 has been released!

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▼Major Bug Fixes
・Implemented a workaround for a bug that caused map data to reset.
・Fixed several Xbox and SteamDeck crashes.

▼Mechanics Rework
・Reworked Random Pal mode. The level of wild pals that appear has been fixed for each region. This means that the strength of enemies will gradually increase as you progress, and only the pals that appear will be random.

▼Balance Adjustments
・Adjusted the elemental chest rewards. They are now guaranteed to drop Dog Coins and also have a low chance of dropping work suitability books too.

▼Network
・Added measures to address the player rubberbanding issues in multiplayer.

▼Optimization
・Optimized save data file sizes.

▼Bug Fixes
・Fixed an issue where Pals at bases would get stuck on each other on dedicated servers
・Fixed an issue where some naturally occurring map objects, such as mushrooms, were not spawning after being destroyed by player construction
・Fixed an issue where neutral NPCs spawned in random events would not become criminal when attacked
・Fixed an issue where Pals would not work if summoned too close to a tree
・Fixed an issue where NPCs would sometimes shake when firing their guns
・Fixed minor bugs such as texture issues
・Fixed an issue where anti-aircraft missile launchers would occasionally respawn
・Fixed an issue where some buildings would not align properly
・Fixed an issue where Pals would not enter caves

==

Thank you for your continued support of Palworld

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The following changes in the v0.4.15 patch were not applied correctly and accidentally left out of the patch:

・Adjusted the elemental chest rewards. They are now guaranteed to drop Dog Coins and also have a low chance of dropping work suitability books too.

We're currently working to correct the issue.

We apologize for the inconvenience and thank you for your continued support of Palworld.

Whatever happens with the lawsuit, it's going to be one for the history books given how Nintendo's patents cover a fair amount of features that quite a number of other games either use or use something very similar. Pocketpair previously gave more info on some of the patents involved. Nintendo also continue to fight for getting more patents approved in the US, so this lawsuit could eventually go multi-national.