Palworld's servers have cost almost £400k/$500k to run so far

Palworld's servers have so far cost 70.53 million Japanese yen to run (around £376,276/$475,349). This is according to a tweet from Pocketpair CEO Takuro Mizobe. "Wait, maybe they'll go bankrupt due to server fees?" Mizobe joked.

The tweet showed an image of the figure, seemingly from the backend of whatever service is providing the server hosting to Pocketpair. The number shown was from "This month", according to a Google machine translation of the text. Palworld went live on January 18th, so it's likely a full month of hosting will cost even more.

Since Palworld launched, it has sold 12 million copies on Steam and reached a concurrent player count of over 2.1 million. That doesn't include a further 7 million players who have accessed the game via Xbox Game Pass. That's a lot of people to host on multiplayer servers - and also, obviously, a lot of revenue from copies sold.

It is worth noting that Palworld is not monetised like a live service game, however, and so it won't have the ongoing revenue of subscriptions or skins and battle passes to cover server costs in the months and years ahead. The game Palworld most closely resembles, Pokémon aside, is Ark: Survival Evolved, and that dino-breeding survival game switched off its official servers late last year shortly before launching a remake.

"Following the order to never let the service go down no matter what, we have prepared servers without regard to cost," wrote Palworld's lead network engineer Chujo Hiroto in a response to the CEO's tweet. "We will continue to give our all to ensure that all players can enjoy to the fullest."

I'm yet to play Palworld and even this early in the year, it feels like there are too many games for me to ever get to it. If you're more intrigued than I, check out our guides team list of all the Pals.