How much money has Palworld made? Steam and total earnings

Palworld exploded in popularity when it launched into early access on Jan. 19, dominating gaming discussions and nearly every Steam leaderboard in terms of sales and player count. On PC alone, the game is already a massive hit, but just how much money did Pocketpair make from Palworld?

Most developers don’t publish full revenue data for their games, opting instead to reveal how many units they sold, or focusing on impressive player count milestones. Pocketpair is openly keeping track of Palworld’s unit sales on social media, and made a big deal about how successful it has been in such a short period. So, while Palworld is still crushing the competition on Steam, let’s work out its revenue. 

How much money has Palworld made since release? Total Palworld earnings and milestones

On Jan. 24, Pocketpair announced that Palworld sold over eight million units less than six days after launch. That reported number only takes into account Steam sales, adding nothing from Xbox Series X|S consoles or the Xbox app for PC to that total.

Based on this information, we have to eliminate any estimations including Xbox sales, as well as the deal between Microsoft and Pocketpair to get Palworld on Xbox Game Pass for console and PC when it launched. Over 7,000 people have reviewed the game on Xbox, though, so there’s clearly an active playerbase on that system, even if it is dwarfed by the Steam numbers. 

At its base level, Steam offers a revenue split where the developer gets 70 percent of all revenue generated by Steam sales, while Valve gets the remaining 30 percent. The percentage taken by Steam shrinks the more a game sells, dropping to a 25 percent split for all income earned above $10 million, and to 20 percent for all income earned above $50 million, according to Valve. This lets us estimate Palworld’s current revenue from Steam based on a few figures we already know.

If we say Palworld sold a flat eight million units as of Jan. 26, and we consider Palworld’s development budget of around $6.7 million from Pocketpair CEO Takuro Mizobe’s Note post, here is a general idea of how much Palworld made at each stage of the Steam revenue split. 

We also need to factor in that Pocketpair also ran a discount for the first week, knocking the game’s initial price down from $29.99 to $26.99 for the entirety of those eight million sales. The model we used was first shared by TweakTown gaming editor Derek Strickland, who estimated the sales numbers at seven million units.

If our estimations hold up, Palworld has generated around $164.6 million in total revenue once you subtract the development budget mentioned by the CEO. This means the game earned roughly 2356.7 percent of its development budget after less than a week on the market.

While Pocketpair is unlikely to ever share an exact amount, Mizobe revealed in a March 15 Bloomberg interview that Palworld had made tens of billions of yen in profit. Given that $164.6 million is tantamount to over 24 billion yen, our estimates may not be that much off. The exact number is probably even higher since, at the time of writing, Palworld has been available for over two months.