After more than two years in early access, the survival-creature smash that took the world by storm is ready to call itself finished. At Summer Game Fest 2026, Pocketpair announced that Palworld will reach its 1.0 release on July 10, 2026 — and marked the occasion with the game's first-ever fully cinematic trailer.
It's a remarkable milestone for a title that launched into early access in January 2024 and promptly became one of the fastest-selling games of the decade, peaking past two million concurrent players on Steam alone. Now, across Xbox, PlayStation 5 and PC, Pocketpair is drawing a line under the early-access era.
The World Tree finally opens
The 1.0 launch isn't just a version-number bump. Pocketpair confirmed it arrives alongside a sizeable update featuring new Pals, new regions and a new threat — and, crucially, access to the World Tree. The enormous tree has loomed over the map since launch as a tantalizing, unreachable landmark; with 1.0, players will finally be able to explore it.
The cinematic itself leaned hard into spectacle rather than systems, but it slipped in a few teases: a new Pal that can transform into a sword, and a showdown with a giant flying creature that, once defeated, opens a path toward that long-mysterious tree. It's the most narrative-forward Pocketpair has ever been about a world players have largely treated as a sandbox.
From phenomenon to finished game
Palworld's early-access run was anything but quiet — a viral launch, a steady cadence of major content drops like the Sakurajima and Feybreak islands, and a high-profile patent dispute with Nintendo that played out across 2024 and 2025. Through all of it, Pocketpair kept shipping, and the 1.0 build is the culmination of that roadmap.
For newcomers, July 10 is a natural jumping-on point: a complete-feeling version with the full map, the headline World Tree region and a fresh endgame threat. For veterans, it's a reason to drop back in and see how the studio caps off one of the most talked-about survival games in years. Either way, the early-access label is about to come off.
