Palworld hit 40 million players and the studio kept the price at $30

Gaming 4 min 9 sources

A tiny studio with a runaway hit had every reason to charge more, and every buyer braced for it — then it held the line, in a week when the rest of the industry was pushing prices the other way.

Key takeaways

Palworld's studio hit 40 million players and every buyer expected a price rise — then it kept the game at $29.99, calling it a thank-you.
With runaway demand and a finished game, the studio had maximum pricing power and chose not to use it, banking goodwill instead of cash.
It happened as the rest of the industry pushes prices up — GTA 6 at $80, Steam at record revenue — making the held price a deliberate stand.

The creature-collecting survival game Palworld left early access and hit its 1.0 launch this week, and its player numbers went vertical. On Steam it briefly pushed past Dota 2, one of the platform’s most-played games for over a decade, in concurrent players over the launch weekend [3]. The game has now sold to more than 40 million players since it first appeared in early 2024 [2].

Then its developer, the small Japanese studio Pocketpair, did the thing almost no one expected: it left the price alone.

The price everyone assumed would go up

Since early 2024, the game’s Steam page had carried a standard line: “The price of the game may increase at or closer to the official release” [1]. That is the normal script for an early-access game — you buy it cheap while it’s unfinished, and when the full version ships, the price climbs. Most players read that line and assumed a $29.99 game would cost more once 1.0 arrived on July 10 [1].

It didn’t. Pocketpair confirmed the game stays at $29.99. “It has become a success beyond our wildest dreams,” the studio said, framing the frozen price as “a small way of saying thank you” to the people who bought in early [1]. A studio holding a genuine hit chose not to charge what the market would clearly bear.

Why that’s a real decision, not a nice gesture

This matters because Pocketpair had about as much pricing power as a studio ever gets. Demand was overwhelming, the product was finished, and buyers were already braced to pay more. In that position, standard pricing logic says raise the number — you would leave money on the table by not. The studio’s own Steam page had pre-announced the increase. Everyone was ready.

Pocketpair still said no. That’s a choice about what kind of relationship it wants with 40 million people — not a one-time sale to squeeze, but an audience to keep. It’s also a studio with a particular history: Pocketpair spent much of 2024 fighting a patent lawsuit brought by Nintendo and The Pokémon Company over Palworld’s mechanics, an outsider that came from nowhere and rattled the biggest name in the business. For a studio whose whole position rests on goodwill, not extracting the last dollar is the asset.

The rest of the industry is going the other way

The timing sharpens the point. Right now the mainstream is testing how high prices can go. Grand Theft Auto 6 is set to launch starting at $80 — up from the $60-$70 that was standard for years — and at least one industry analyst called even that too cheap, saying the game “should be charging like $200 for this” [4]. When Take-Two first revealed the $80 figure, its stock briefly dipped [4].

And higher prices are working, for the platforms at least. Steam is reportedly having its biggest-ever six months, an estimated $11.1 billion in gross revenue in the first half of the year, driven partly by “higher priced blockbusters” [5][6]. One analyst summed up the platform’s trajectory: “The long arc is relentlessly up” [7]. This is happening while much of the rest of the industry contracts — one report described “non-stop closures, cancellations and collapse” around Steam even as Steam thrives [5].

So Pocketpair held its price at exactly the moment the industry decided players would pay more. That contrast is the story.

The other side of the same coin

The same week, the French publisher Ubisoft described a shift to what it called a “selective model” — fewer big bets, less reliance on any single game launch [8]. That’s a different response to the same pressure. Where Pocketpair is protecting a relationship with players, big publishers are protecting themselves from the risk that any one expensive game fails to sell. Both are reactions to an industry where a launch can make or sink a studio.

There’s also a quieter fact under all of this: a report this week found games are almost always cheaper in physical shops than on digital storefronts [9]. The list price you’re told to expect is rarely the only price that exists. What a company charges — and what it chooses not to charge — is a decision, not a fact of nature.

02 · Lesson · why it matters

The price of expecting to be back tomorrow

"Charge what they'll pay" is good advice only if you're never coming back — change that one assumption and the smart move flips.

A studio had a runaway hit, a finished game, and 40 million people who were braced to pay more. The obvious move was to raise the price. It didn’t. That looks like a kind gesture. Read it more carefully and it’s closer to arithmetic — a bet about which kind of game the studio is actually playing.

Two games that look the same

Picture a single deal. You have something someone badly wants, and they’ll never buy from you again — a stall at a festival that packs up tonight, a house sale to a stranger moving across the country. In that game, the rule is simple: charge what they’ll pay. Anything you leave on the table is money you’ll never see, from a person you’ll never meet again.

Now picture a different game. Same product, same demand — but you’ll be dealing with these same people for years. The coffee shop on your street. The neighbour who lends you a ladder. A studio that plans to keep updating one game, and to sell those same players its next one. This game looks identical in the single moment, but it isn’t one deal. It’s the first move in a long series.

And the smart move flips. In the second game, the dollar you don’t extract today isn’t lost. It’s spent — on the next round, and the one after that. The customer who feels fairly treated comes back, tells others, forgives your mistakes, defends you when someone attacks. Goodwill isn’t sentiment here. It’s a stockpile you build in exactly one way: by not taking everything you could, every time you could.

The advice that hides its own assumption

Here’s the part worth slowing down on. “Maximise every transaction” gets handed around as plain business wisdom, the neutral, grown-up thing to do. But it isn’t neutral. It carries a buried assumption — that this is the last time you’ll meet — and it only holds when that assumption is true.

Strip the assumption out and lay it bare and you can ask the useful question: whose advice is this, really? The person who most wants you to squeeze every deal is usually the one who only expected to be here once. The consultant paid by the quarter. The owner planning to sell the company before the bill comes due. The tourist haggling in a market they’ll never return to. Extraction is the natural instinct of someone passing through. Patience is the instinct of someone who plans to stay.

None of that makes squeezing wrong. On a genuine one-shot, it’s just correct. The error isn’t greed — it’s misreading which game you’re in.

You’re playing these games all day

This isn’t a lesson about studios. You are in a dozen of these games right now, and you don’t always know which is which.

The landlord who charges for every scuff and delays every repair is playing the one-shot game — betting you’ll leave anyway, so why invest. The one who fixes the leak the same day is playing the repeated game — betting you’ll renew, and recommend. Same building, opposite logic, and the tenant feels the difference before they can name it. The boss who squeezes unpaid overtime is spending goodwill they’ll want back the week they need someone to stay late. A government that treats citizens as a one-time tax base behaves very differently from one that expects to face them again.

And the mistake runs both ways. Plenty of us over-give to people we’ll genuinely never see again — pouring patience into a stranger who was only ever passing through — while treating the people we’ll deal with for decades as if each encounter were the last. The small resentment banked with a partner, the corner cut with a long-time colleague: those are extractions in a repeated game, and the bill arrives, just later.

The hard part is that you rarely know at the moment of choosing. The studio doesn’t know for certain that these 40 million players will buy the next game. The tenant doesn’t know they’ll stay three years. You choose the move before you know which game it was — and the shape of the game only becomes clear when the second round arrives, or doesn’t.

What holds still and what keeps moving

So the studio’s frozen price isn’t proof of virtue, and it might not even be proof of wisdom. Maybe it should have charged more and put the money into making better things — plenty of loved studios have been generous straight into their own graves. From inside the game, still being played, nobody can see the whole board. The move that reads as loyalty today might read as a missed chance in a year, and we won’t know which until the series runs longer.

What’s worth carrying isn’t a rule about prices. It’s the question underneath the price. Before you take everything a moment offers — or give more than it’s worth — it’s worth asking whether you’re passing through or planning to stay, and whether the person across from you is doing the same. Most of the friction between people comes from two players who never checked which game they were in. One was counting a single deal. The other was keeping score across a lifetime. They were never really playing the same thing.

03 · Lab · your turn

The Regulars

Run the same shop month after month and feel how squeezing wins today but drains the crowd, while a one-shot flips the math.

04 · Hope · carry this

A studio that could have charged whatever it wanted looked at 40 million people and decided to keep faith with them instead. The quiet proof that plenty who could squeeze still choose to stay — and that treating people as if you'll meet again tends to be its own reward.