Palworld

VS

Scum

Palworld is a survival/adventure sandbox game released in January 2024 by Pocketpair. It experienced an explosive launch with millions of sales and high concurrent player counts on PC. Since launch, player counts have declined from their peak but remain strong for a new multiplayer survival game, thanks to active updates and ongoing community engagement. It's not an MMO, as servers are typically limited to smaller group sizes and don't feature a true persistent, massively multiplayer world.

Scum is a multiplayer open-world survival game developed by Gamepires and originally entered Early Access in 2018. While it is not a full MMO, it supports servers with dozens of players (up to 64 per server). The game maintains a niche but dedicated following and is frequently updated; however, it has never reached large mainstream status. Based on long-term trends of similar survival games, its daily active player base is estimated to be in the low thousands, and this estimate would hold unless a major relaunch or expansion revitalized the player base.