Palworld Xbox and Steam parity “at the mercy of certification”, developer says

Palworld is a bit different on Xbox compared to Steam in part because of Microsoft’s certification process.

Over on the Palworld Discord server, the game’s community manager Bucky clarified that the versions of Palworld are “not the same between Steam and Xbox”, as in Steam v1.2 and Xbox v1.2 are different even though the version numbers are the same.

“There seems to be some confusion that Steam and Xbox are ‘missing features’. This isn’t entirely true,” Bucky wrote on Discord (thanks, Windows Central). “Some features may be slightly different or have different value but other issues like the missing exit game button etc are not a result of an ‘older build’, these are separate issues.”

Bucky continued: “In fact, Steam and Xbox will likely never have identical version numbers until the games are brought to be cross play compatible because at that point they will be the same game internally.”

Palworld’s community manager said this “doesn’t mean Xbox is necessarily ‘behind’ or anything”. It means “they are just fundamentally two different versions of the game because the architecture on Xbox is different” to Steam.

“Of course, the goal is to bring them to the exact same place but this won’t be achievable until crossplay is fully compatible,” Bucky wrote, before continuing in a later post: “What I am saying is, a lot of people are asking for Xbox to be brought up to v1.2 right now but Xbox’s v1.2 is not the same at Steam’s v1.2.”

Bucky has been further replying to users inquiring about hotfixes and such, regardless of that slightly confusing version number situation. Bucky said a hotfix for Palworld had gone live a few days prior on Steam, but users with the Xbox version will need to wait. This is because the fix is currently “sitting in the MS certification queue”.

When further asked about parity between Steam and Xbox with things like DLSS, Bucky again stated certification was the part of the reason that some features are seemingly ‘missing’ from Microsoft’s version of Palworld.

“Some of these things will take extra time,” Bucky replied. “We’re desperately trying to speed this up.”

Despite all this, Palworld has clocked up some truly astonishing player numbers over the last few days. Just this morning, it was revealed the game had sold 5m copies in three days.

Palworld? More like Pal-Worldwide Domination, am I right?