Palworld becomes second game to pass 2m concurrent Steam players

Palworld has passed another impressive milestone, with more than two million concurrent players on Steam recorded.

Palworld is only the second game to ever manage this. The other is PUBG, which boasts a concurrent player record of 3,257,248 on Valve's platform.

Newscast: Will Pokémon take Palworld down

While Pocketpair's breakout hit is yet to creep over the 3 million bar, it is still welcoming an enormous number of players, with 1,531,287 Pal tamers currently making their way through the world at the time of writing. These numbers will surely increase further over the weekend, when the work week is done.

Developer Pocketpair recently announced it had sold 8m copies of Palworld on Steam in less than six days. The total number of Palworld players, however, will be even higher than that, as it is also available on Xbox, including Game Pass.

Earlier this week, Palworld saw its US numbers on Xbox briefly surpass those of perennial favourite Fortnite, with users spending more than 200 minutes on average in the game.

Following Palworld's historic early access release, Pocketpair is now looking to the future. Along with addressing Palworld's various bugs, the studio has also released a roadmap of improvements for the early access game. This will include new elements like PvP, end-game Raid Bosses, new Pals and more.

But it hasn't been plain sailing for the developer. Just yesterday, The Pokémon Company issued a rare statement indirectly addressing Palworld, after claims that Pocketpair had directly copied its designs. "We intend to investigate and take appropriate measures to address any acts that infringe on intellectual property rights related to the Pokémon," its statement read.

Prior to this statement, The Pokémon Company's former chief legal officer Don McGowan said he was "surprised" Palworld had "got this far".