The costs behind the extremely popular game from Pocket Pair (or Pocketpair? both names are used) are not low.

Palworld launched two weeks ago in Early Access on Steam, where it has already amassed over 12 million players, but it has also made its way to Xbox consoles (Xbox Series, Xbox One), where it has also reached 7 million players, helped by its debut on Xbox Game Pass. But the monster-collecting and monster-working game also needs to be maintained. Server costs cannot be swept under the rug, and Pocket Pair knows this.

Takuro Mizobe, the studio’s CEO, revealed on Twitter that the server costs for February were over 70 million yen. A hefty sum even in USD: $478K! And that’s just for one month! No wonder Mizobe joked that they would go bankrupt because of the costs (but let’s not forget that the game costs $30 on Steam, and the studio has made $360 million from that alone, and compared to that the server fee is about $478,000). Steam takes 30% of that (true, it could be 20% after a certain threshold), but that still leaves at least $252 million in the studio’s pocket. So about 6 million a year is plenty if you include server costs…

Palworld network engineer Chujo Hiroto said in an English response to Mizobe’s post: “Following the order to never let the service go down no matter what, we have prepared servers regardless of the cost. We will continue to do everything we can to ensure that all players can enjoy the game to the fullest! $478,000…” So they made the servers bombproof on purpose, so that the system wouldn’t crash for a single moment…

Pocket Pair is admittedly not a very experienced studio, but it proves how much of a shame the Diablo III fiasco of 2012 with the 37 error message was for Activision Blizzard, because they were still a huge publisher…

Source: PCGamer, Twitter, Twitter