Palworld has now outsold every mainline Pokémon game released since 1996. That’s not hyperbole, it’s the actual historical bar the new estimate clears. Alinea Analytics puts Palworld’s lifetime sales at roughly 30.5 million copies following its July 10 exit from early access, with $700 million in gross software revenue. According to Serebii’s Joe Merrick, no single Pokémon game has crossed 30 million units since Pokémon Red, Green, and Blue in 1996, which makes the comparison driving headlines this week not just clickbait framing but an accurate, verifiable claim. A creature collecting game built almost entirely by a small independent studio has now out-sold thirty years of the franchise it was accused of copying, using a single title’s numbers as the yardstick. The platform breakdown is where the real story sits. An estimated 86% of total sales, roughly 27.1 million copies, come from Steam alone, and the post 1.0 numbers only sharpen that gap. Since launch, Steam picked up nearly 1.5 million additional copies generating $25 million, PlayStation added about 300,000 copies for $7 million, and Xbox managed just under 70,000 copies for roughly $1 million, a fraction of the other platforms despite Microsoft’s console install base. The reason traces directly to Xbox Game Pass, where Palworld has been available since launch. Alinea’s playtime data shows nearly half of Xbox players dropped the game before the five hour mark, compared to just 12% on Steam and 23% on PlayStation, and only 8% of Xbox players crossed 100 hours versus 20% of Steam owners. Game Pass access didn’t just fail to convert Xbox players into buyers, it appears to have actively suppressed the depth of engagement compared to players who paid for the game directly. None of these figures are officially confirmed by Pocketpair, Steam, Sony, or Microsoft. Alinea’s estimates are built from tracked storefront and engagement data rather than publisher disclosure, the standard caveat for any third party sales analysis in gaming. What isn’t speculative is the shape of the platform split itself, mirrored independently by at least one other Steam-specific revenue tracker showing hundreds of millions in gross revenue from Steam sales alone, a figure consistent with Alinea’s broader estimate even before PlayStation and Xbox are added in. A studio that once got dismissed as making a Pokémon clone just quietly out-earned three decades of the games it was compared to, and it did it primarily on a platform where players actually had to pay to find out if the criticism was fair.