Palworld is spending £378K a month on servers to ensure the service "never goes down"

Pocketpair is spending around half a million dollars a month – that's around £378,000 – to keep its sleeper-hit Palworld's servers online.

In a tweet, Pocketpair CEO Takuro Mizobe posted a snippet of how the cost of servers have changed since the game launched just a few short weeks ago, joking – I hope, anyway – that the studio could "go bankrupt from server fees".

Not that that kind of cost is prohibitive, apparently; Palworld network engineer Chujo Hiroto replied to their boss' message, revealing to the world that they'd been instructed to "never let the service go down no matter what".

"Following the order to never let the service go down no matter what, we have prepared servers without regard to cost," Hiroto added. "We will continue to give our all to ensure that all players can enjoy to the fullest! $478,000…"

Less than two weeks after its early access release, Palworld has officially surpassed 19m players on Xbox Series X/S and PC, with Microsoft now touting it as the biggest third-party launch in Game Pass' history.

As Matt summarised for us earlier this week, we've known developer Pocketpair has had a hit on its hands with Palworld for some time now; its early access launch on 19th January got off a bumpy start as an initial influx of players brought the game's servers to their knees, and just 24 hours later, Pocketpair revealed 2m players were already galavanting around the Palapagos Islands.

Palworld then became one of only six games ever to hit 1m concurrent players on Steam, and then updated sales figures brought the news it had shifted over 5m copies in just three days. Six days after launch, Steam sales hit 8m.