Palworld devs may be paying almost $500K a month to keep servers up ‘no matter what’

Palworld is one of the most popular games in the world right now, bringing in millions of players despite being an early-access title. And to maintain its ongoing success, the developers at Pocketpair are paying a small fortune to keep the servers up “no matter what.” 

Pocketpair CEO Takuro Mizobe has been very open about certain factors of Palworld’s development in recent interviews and posts on social media. Now, he has joked that the company is “going bankrupt” while showing off a more than 70 million yen, or roughly $478,000, monthly server cost. 

According to his post, the server costs for Palworld have spiked 359 percent over the last month—though it’s unclear if this is the total cost for all of Pocketpair’s game servers or just Palworld’s on its own. That jump can be attributed to the game breaking 19 million total players less than two weeks after its Jan. 19 release on Steam and Xbox platforms. On Steam alone, the game averages more than 1.1 million daily active users, while that number is almost doubled to just shy of three million players on Xbox, according to Microsoft. 

As the game continues to succeed and Pocketpair works to improve the game with multiple weekly updates, servers are a priority that the small dev team can’t put on the back burner. To that effect, an internal order to “never let the servers go down” has been in effect since launch. And while we don’t know the exact size of Pocketpair’s staff and how many people are working on Palworld, it has previously been said by Mizobe that only one person was running dedicated network and infrastructure work for the company.

That engineer, Chujo Hiroto, has also been active on social media and confirmed this is how things are currently operating. “Following the order to never let the service go down no matter what, we have prepared servers without regard to cost,” Hiroto said. “We will continue to give our all to ensure that all players can enjoy to the fullest.”

These server costs should decrease as the player count for Palworld averages out and the dev team is given time to focus more of its efforts on finding a more affordable solution and work on the content roadmap for future updates. For now, however, the team is focused on addressing critical bugs and issues to ensure players can continue to enjoy the game without experiencing game-breaking problems.