It turns out that Palworld being popular enough to bring in 19 million players means that server costs are pretty high.
Somehow, despite my own reservations about how the game looks, Palworld has managed to hit 19 million players across both Steam and Xbox, 12 million of those players being just Steam, meaning that's how many copies it's sold on the PC storefront. It's a ridiculously high number, and will easily cement it as the most popular independent release of the year, and potentially one of the most successful games of the year overall. But, the price of success is a high one, as demonstrated by Pocketpair CEO Takuro Mizobe.
In a recent tweet from Mizobe, the CEO shared that server costs for the game, which only released January 19, are already 70.53 million Japanese yen, around £376,276/ $475,349. "Wait, maybe they'll go bankrupt due to server fees?" Mizobe jokingly wrote alongside an image showing off the server costs. That cost isn't even for a full month of the game being out, so the monthly cost is likely to be even higher come February 19.
