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If you were anywhere near the gaming sphere this weekend you’ll no doubt be at least aware of Palworld, and its huge first weekend appears to have resulted in a number of issues on the Epic Online Services.
Palworld, which launched into early access on Friday, has seen an unprecedented numbers of players all jumping on to try out the ‘Pokémon with guns’ survival game across both PC and Xbox. As a result, many players reported a fair amount of tech issues with the developers themselves even announcing on the game’s official X (formerly Twitter account) the following notice: “As the number of concurrent players across all platforms exceeded 1.3 million, the Epic Online Service is currently experiencing outages due to an unusual high load worldwide. Singleplayer is unaffected by this server outage. This is causing connectivity issues with co-op and servers.”
This huge number looks set to be a pattern going forward, especially as the developer has been touting on its sales numbers on the game’s socials declaring that it had reached a whopping 5 million sales in just three days according to its own metrics and beating out plenty of PlayStation launch weekend numbers of the same timeframe. As of the time of writing, it’s even boasting that Palworld’s Steam users alone have reached 1.5 million currently playing as of Monday, January 22nd, making it the third highest concurrently played game on Steam ever.
The developers confirmed that they held an emergency meeting with the Epic Games team over the weekend to “add an update to the Epic Online Services at short notice” which was intended to help in the short term. However, by Monday it was confirmed that the Support team has received “over 50,000 enquiries, and in an update the official X account posted “The development team is aware of serious bugs that are occurring, such as being unable to enter servers, unable to play multiplayer and losing saved data and are currently working on fixing them. We will share information about these fixes for this issues as soon as possible.”
For those not in the loop, Palworld is a survival game, allowing you to craft structures a little like Fortnite, while surviving in a game with Pokemon-like creatures with different abilities. There’s also guns, gadgets and bosses to fight, and dungeons to run. It seems the game’s going to remain popular for a while yet – so we’ll have to see if Epic’s experience with Fortnite will help developer Pocket Pair sort out their online issues.
In the meantime, check out our Palworld beginner’s guide – 7 tips and tricks to survive on Palpagos Island or our guide to Palworld Best mining Pals – how to dig up stone quickly.
