When the small Palworld team, based in Japan, hit the green light on the game on Jan. 19, 2024 successfully pushing the game public into early access developers gathered around the office vending machine to celebrate. Immediately, players started to flood in. It was an instant success. The group watched the numbers go up: ten thousand, twenty thousand, fifty thousand, one hundred thousand. Thats when a couple of the developers had to go back to their desks because things started to get a bit shaky, global community manager John Bucky Buckley told Polygon in December.And the numbers kept increasing quickly. Two hundred thousand, three hundred thousand, five hundred thousand. The Palworld team had to issue a statement on X shortly before midnight Japan time instructing players to try logging in a few times or waiting a bit to log in after launching the game; the servers were unstable due to the massive amount of people trying to play. Throughout the night it kept going, Buckley said. And there was a point, definitely after midnight because a few of us had gone home who lived far away, that the servers broke. That was around a million.Somewhere within the chaos, Epic Games (where the online servers were hosted) got in touch to help stabilize things. Over the next few days, the game surpassed 2 million players on Steam alone. It dethroned Fortnite on Xbox. All of our multiplayer capabilities started getting weird, going down and crashing, Buckley said. It was a lot of intense lag, but Epic was amazing. They super quickly allocated more resources to us and they helped out.It was help that was desperately needed: Pocketpair had one server guy when Palworld launched. One server guy who was 21 or 22 years old at the time Buckley joked he aged quickly in those first few days. He was trying his best, Buckley said. As a team, Pocketpair had about 35 people working on Palworld, including external developers. The server problems, of course, spilled over into community management, too: We had to streamline our bug reporting system because it wasnt very good at launch, Buckley said. Support was messy.With help, the servers eventually stabilized, despite Palworlds player numbers staying consistently high. Palworld held over 1 million concurrent players for days into February. I dont think we dropped under 100,000 until, I want to say, April, Buckley said. Palworld has consistently had a five-digit concurrent player base, occasionally bumping back into the six digits for updates, until late December 2024, due to the Palworld Feybreak expansion, which pushed the game into six-figure player counts again.Speaking to Polygon in December, ahead of the Feybreak announcement at The Game Awards in Los Angeles, Buckley expounded on what the team learned from the launch. We definitely panicked more than we should have, Buckley said. Didnt need to pull as many all-nighters as we did. And I wish I reached out to other people for advice sooner.He continued: You get caught up in it, especially when theres a wind of negative sentiment from players, even if its 100% valid and theyre right. Its very overwhelming when the comments are flooding in.The big lesson? No ego-searching, or egosa, as its called in Japan dont search for the game on social media, Buckley said. You pay attention to feedback reports and bugs, but the developers dont need to see everything. The level of success Palworld reached in such a short period of time before the game has even been fully released is something not a lot of developers and studios have experienced, or will experience.Theres a lot on the horizon for Pocketpair and Palworld heading into its 1.0 release. (No timing on that.) Part of Pocketpairs future will involve dealing with a lawsuit filed in Japan by The Pokmon Company and Nintendo for patent infringement related to how Pal Spheres work too close to Pok Balls, the suit claims and other details. The legal proceedings are expected to move slowly, but Pocketpair has recently made an update to Palworld that changes how Pals are summoned, something people have speculated is related to the lawsuit. (Buckley declined to comment, but said Pocketpair would explain these changes to players eventually.)