Last year was an indie year, but no game proves that better than Palworld, whose developers announced that the game amassed over 32 million players in its first year on the market. This places the indie title way above several AAA releases, proving massive budgets aren’t the key to success.
Pocketpair, the developer behind this indie smash hit, announced this colossal milestone on X on Feb. 19, Palworld‘s first birthday. Having launched in January 2024, the game has since pulled in over 32 million players across all platforms, cementing itself in the gaming hall of fame both in terms of popularity and quality. It’s also the third-most played game on Steam of all time, only trailing behind PUBG, which paved the way for battle royale games in 2017, and Black Myth: Wukong, which had an unprecedented launch in China. Being an indie title, Palworld has once again proved that massive AAA budgets don’t mean those games will actually land with players—a point particularly illustrated by the fact that a sea of AAA endeavors launched in 2024 failed to reach even a fraction of the players Palworld did.
Take, for example, Concord, a game on which Sony allegedly spent hundreds of millions of dollars. Aiming to create an entire franchise out of it, and going as far as giving the new title an episode in its gaming anthology series Secret Level, Sony put a ton of focus and cash into the title. However, the game attracted only a few hundred players on Steam during peak hours, leading to the title crashing with no applause whatsoever and Sony pulling the plug. Untold amounts of money, effort, and developer jobs all gone to waste.
Suicide Squad: Kill the Justice League, developed by a beloved studio in Rocksteady, published by a massive entertainment company in Warner Bros., and riding an established IP, also failed spectacularly. With some 13,000 players joining during peak hours on launch day and an average concurrent player count of about 200 to 300, KTJL was one of the biggest financial failures of 2024. It went as far as leading Warner Bros. to reconsider its gaming endeavors, as the game also allegedly cost them hundreds of millions.
These are just two examples of utter failure in the AAA gaming department, with the likes of Skull and Bones and others contributing to the closure of countless of development studios, and an estimated 10,000 jobs lost in the gaming industry last year. Indies like Palworld and Balatro dominated the gaming sphere in 2024 instead, judging by the sheer number of players that decided to flock to those titles instead of existing, well-known and established AAA gaming companies.
All these numbers should give hope to indie developers heading into 2025—and serve as a warning to AAA publishers.
