Shockbyte Interview: Palworld’s Launch Was 25x Larger Than Minecraft For The Company

James: Hey there, I’m James Zinn, the Head of Partnerships here at Shockbyte! I’ve been playing Minecraft since I was a teenager, and I love many other modern games, such as RuneScape and CS2! Shockbyte is a multiplayer game server hosting company full of enthusiastic gamers and content creators who are all looking for the best way to make their multiplayer experience even better.

We built our new Shockbyte Control Panel to make game server hosting easier, faster, and more streamlined than ever before. Built on over a decade of feedback we’ve received, we are also all gamers at heart, so we understand the struggles our users have experienced. We’ve streamlined the most tedious parts of multiplayer server hosting into a single, all-in-one, easy-access control panel that empowers even the least technical hosts to dive in headfirst.

James: Since the beta release of April 2nd, the feedback has been incredibly encouraging. While it’s still early days, we’ve received an overwhelming wave of positive responses from our community. Users have been quick to applaud the significant departure from our previous panel, particularly praising the new appearance, enhanced features, and heightened accessibility.

As we continue to gather insights and data, our focus remains squarely on refining and perfecting the Shockbyte Control Panel. While we’re thrilled with the initial reception, we’re also keenly aware that there’s always room for improvement. That’s why we’re diligently listening to our users, analyzing their feedback, and pinpointing any areas that could benefit from further enhancement.

James: We expected that this product release would be the start of something monumental in our industry, and we have seen a response from users and beta testers that encourages us to continue to think so. The industry suffers from dated systems and complicated customer experiences when things should be just as easy as playing the games themselves.

We’ve taken every step to lower the barrier to entry for new hosts while still giving our most veteran hosts the ability to perform all the actions they need. Not only that, but Shockbyte has enhanced every backend capacity we are able to: minimizing loading times, optimizing server performance, and displaying metrics as cleanly as we can to our users.

James: As of right now, Shockbyte plans to release our full Shockbyte Control Panel in 2-3 months.

James: Shockbyte’s most widely used server has been Minecraft for well over 11+ years until the release of Palworld, which blew the hinges off our server stock. Players were flooding our pages, allowing us to deliver well over 2,000 Palworld servers every single day for the first week of launch. At one point, Shockbyte was selling a brand new Palworld server every 4 seconds.

Palworld’s launch was nearly 25x larger than any other game title we have worked on, and it became 25% of our entire business. Enshrouded also features a sprawling community that we support eagerly, but the player base of 2 million players is much smaller than Palworld’s 16+ million.

James: Depending on the direction it takes, the Pocket Pair team has a lot of room to create something that will continually bring back their community to the game. With live-ops support and continual updates, players will be looking forward to future content, and multiplayer server support owned by players is the key to the game’s longevity.

At Shockbyte, we’ve been pushing a mantra for indie developers that we call “POGS” or “Player Owned Game Servers.” Games that allow players the freedom to own their own servers, their own communities, and sometimes their own user-generated content are ones that can thrive much longer than originally expected.

James: This is exactly the concept of “POGS”. Player-owned game servers allow players to have a stake in their community by literally owning a digital landscape in which the players can exist. Palworld could not have survived server-hosting costs on launch if they did not choose this style of multiplayer connection, and players would not have been so invested in their own multiplayer if they did not have the opportunity to choose their own hosting options, their own server properties, and many other factors.

Communities can be formed around these online game servers, which began quickly during the launch of Palworld. This creates an ecosystem of players who are invested in not only the community but also the title. This is by far the most important factor in determining the longevity of a game.

James: Current Industry standards. Developers often choose to develop multiplayer games using the industry standards, and that may drown them in server infrastructure costs or debt, or they may be put off exploring multiplayer options. We have a job to do to educate more developers that the standard way is not the only way.

When we introduce new developers and even AAA development studios to the option of POGS, also known as “Player-Owned Game Servers,” they are astounded at the idea that there are zero server hosting overheads, and players desire the opportunity to optimize their own servers. When more developers choose to use this server hosting route, we will see an improvement in multiplayer gaming quality, and we simply need to educate developers on these options.

James: Over 15 years of Shockbyte, we have received a wide variety of feedback, all of which we have collected and used to craft a better experience. With this feedback, we took the direction and rebuilt our support team to fulfill our customers’ needs, allowing us to provide 24/7 support, which we continue to optimize even to this day.

Whenever a user has had a bad experience with us, we take it very personally, as each customer is a gamer looking to create something magical online. This is very relatable for the Shockbyte team and we help fulfill the goal this customer was attempting to accomplish, along with always providing them due recompense so they can still enjoy their experience to the fullest.

James: Shockbyte is beyond excited to release the Shockbyte Control Panel in the next few months and looks to add additional, previously unannounced features as time goes on. Stay tuned on our Shockbyte Panel web page!