The World's Most Popular Video Game Is a Huge Mistake

The first thing you need to know about Palworld, a new video game developed and published by the Japanese studio Pocketpair, is that it is ludicrously popular. According to data scraped from Steam, a digital storefront for PC games, Palworld became the second game ever after 2017's PlayerUnknown's Battlegrounds to breach 2 million concurrent players last week. Palworld arrived on Jan. 19, so that growth laps some of the most commercially solvent franchises in the industry--the server concentrations of Counter-Strike and Grand Theft Auto V can eat their hearts out. All this is to say that Pocketpair has a genuine phenomenon on its hands: Palworld, much like Fortnite or Minecraft before it, is poised to dominate the corridors of elementary schools for the rest of 2024, for better or worse. This is unfortunate news for me, and, really, anyone else who cares about the virtues of interactive entertainment, because Palworld's appeal is totally inscrutable.