Monster-collecting survival game Palworld has amassed an astonishing 19 million players, and that extraordinary success hasn’t come cheap to its indie developer: According to a post by PocketPlayer CEO Takuro Mizobe, Palworld’s estimated February server cost was $70 million. More than yen. This works out to over $475,000 USD.
“Wait, maybe we’ll go bankrupt from server fees?” Mizobe joked (translated from Japanese).
I wouldn’t worry Very excess. PocketPlayer says it has sold approximately 12 million copies of Palworld on Steam. At $30 each, this brings Palworld’s gross revenue to date to $360 million, and that’s ignoring its Xbox sales (it’s also on Game Pass).
After a certain threshold, Steam’s cut of revenue drops from 30% to 20%, but for the sake of argument, let’s only give Steam a 30% cut of that $360 million. This still leaves $252 million before expenses for out-of-pocket payers. $6 million per year in server costs doesn’t look so unsustainable next to that number.
“Adhering to the mandate to never let service go down no matter what, we have prepared servers without regard to cost,” said Palworld server engineer Chuzo Hiroto in an English response to Mizobe’s post. “We will continue to give our all to make sure all players can have all the fun! $478,000…”
Obviously Palworld isn’t going to sell more than 12 million copies a month, and unlike online games that justify their high maintenance and ongoing development costs with premium cosmetics and seasonal moneymakers like the Battle Pass, in Palworld There are no microtransactions at this time.
(Image credit: Chujo Hiroto)
Out of curiosity, I plugged Palworld’s Steam concurrent figures (it reached over 2 million last month) into a pricing calculator for Amazon’s game hosting service, and got figures of over a million dollars per month, depending on the variables. was easy. Such as the number of game sessions per instance. Running large online games is certainly expensive.
I’m also a little amazed that Palworld and whoever is paying it half a million a month have managed their astonishing success so easily. I can’t imagine a small indie developer like PocketPair – which has admitted its inexperience – meeting this kind of demand a decade ago. Even the biggest developers may be overwhelmed. Diablo 3 and Error 37 were just released back in 2012, and Diablo 3 amassed fewer players in its first year than Palworld’s first two weeks. Thanks, Cloud?
As the year progresses, the number of people playing Palworld at the same time will certainly decrease, reducing costs, however PocketPlayer plans to increase the four-player co-op server limit, which will have the opposite effect. .
For now, if you want more friends in your Palworld world, you can host a Palworld dedicated server yourself – which supports up to 32 players.
Source: www.pcgamer.com
