Palworld developer Pocketpair has confirmed that its open-world survival game will leave early access and reach its 1.0 release on Friday 10th July, and, unusually, the studio will not raise the price to mark the milestone. Early access titles traditionally increase their price at full launch to reflect their completed state, so Pocketpair's decision to keep the game at its current cost "as a small way of saying thank you" — a move that appears to be permanent — stands out as a notably player-friendly gesture.

The game will remain priced at $29.99 / £24.99, and the announcement coincided with news that Palworld has now surpassed 40m players since its January 2024 debut, celebrated with a recap video teasing future content. That player figure is inflated by the game's day-one arrival on Xbox and PC Game Pass, so it does not equal sales; by September 2025 the game had sold over 25m copies. Game Pass subscribers will also receive the 1.0 update on 10th July. Pocketpair, whose boss Takuro Mizobe once called the game's success "too big" for a studio its size, now employs around 110 people and has expanded into publishing, while the game peaked at more than 2m concurrent players on Steam despite ongoing legal friction with Nintendo.