Palworld developer Pocketpair has acknowledged the significant impact “cheating and the influence of fraudulent activities” is having on rule-abiding players of its hugely popular survival game, and has outlined some of the steps it’ll be taking – including the introduction of an “external anti-cheat solution” – to tackle the problem.
Writing in a post shared on Steam, Pocketpair admitted that, while the studio has been “dealing with each issue on a daily basis and taking measures”, there are “many cases where we are not able to keep up” with cheating and fraudulent activities – leading, it acknowledged, to “some players [being] unable to play the game properly.”
Pocketpair apologised for “any inconvenience this may cause” and – expanding on a recent tweet promising a cheating-related patch “soon” – revealed it’s currently working on a number of specific measures to deal with cheating and fraudulent activity “strictly and as a priority”.
First up will be a new player list function for servers, arriving at the end of this month, which Pocketpair says will “strengthen the identification of players who engage in cheating and the suspension of their use by the development team.”
That’ll be followed by the introduction of an unnamed external anti-cheat solution to the game. Use of this will be mandatory on Palworld’s official servers, but optional on community servers, and for those playing solo or in co-op.
“Our entire team is working hard to get everyone back to a state where they can enjoy the game comfortably,” Pocketpair concluded, “and with peace of mind as soon as possible.”
Today’s developer update follows a busy first month of early access for Palworld, in which it managed to surpass 2m concurrent players on Steam – only the second game to do so – and amassed a total of over 19m players across all platforms, becoming the “biggest third-party Game Pass launch ever” along the way. Since then, Pocketpair has revealed it’s spending £378K a month on servers, joking the studio could “go bankrupt from server fees”.