At this point, it’s official: Palworld is a cultural phenomenon. Whether you love or hate it, this Pokémon parody title has officially garnered widespread acclaim in the gaming community, with over two million players enjoying Palworld on PC alone.
But Pocketpair’s open-world survival game isn’t just a PC sensation. According to new data, Palworld was, at least briefly, more popular than Fortnite on Xbox.
That’s right, Fortnite.
Is Palworld more popular than Fortnite?
Analyst group Circana recently looked at data for Palworld’s performance on Jan. 22 for Xbox U.S. users. According to company analyst Mat Piscatella, Palworld overtook Fortnite for daily active users on the console on Monday. Not just that, but Palworld fans were apparently pouring a significant amount of time into the game earlier this week.
“On that day alone, Palworld players on XBS in the U.S. played Palworld for more than 200 minutes, on average,” Piscatella tweeted. “Bonkers numbers.”
To be clear, Palworld didn’t accomplish an overwhelming victory over Epic Games’ massively popular battle royale title. In a follow-up tweet, Piscatella explained that the daily active user numbers between the two games were “close.” It’s very plausible that Palworld and Fortnite will take turns, with Palworld surpassing Fortnite on Xbox on Monday, only for Fortnite to gain the lead again sometime later this week.
In other words, Palworld is not the next Fortnite, not right now anyway. “Consider it more a small-sample data point for funsies stat for now than anything else,” Piscatella tweeted.
Maybe the novelty of a violent Pokémon parody will wear off after this initial burst, but there’s always the chance that Palworld could surpass Fortnite when the game leaves early access. There’s also the chance that Palworld won’t die down in popularity right away, causing the game to surpass Fortnite day-over-day. It’s not uncommon for well-received and strongly hyped games to have an enormous post-early access boom, which was the case for both PUBG: Battlegrounds and Baldur’s Gate 3.
We’ll need more data to confirm Palworld‘s ongoing popularity but for now, this is an impressive victory.
(feature image: Pocketpair)
