"Pal World" is already ridiculously popular, selling 4 million copies in about three days. And the experience on Steam is far superior, thanks to the nonsense of some authentication processes.

The game's developer, Pocket Pair, is grappling with some thorny system architecture that is affecting both Xbox, the Microsoft Store, and ultimately Game Pass. This is due to some remarks on Palworld's Discord server (thanks, Windows Central). Bucky, the game's community manager, writes:

"The game version is not the same on Steam and Xbox. In other words, Steam v1.2 and Xbox v1.2 are not the same thing; there seems to be some confusion about 'missing features' on Steam and Xbox. That is not entirely true."

According to Bucky, there are two different problems going on. First, Microsoft's "architectural differences" - at least on Xbox, although such structural issues seem to affect the Microsoft Store/Game Pass version to some extent. However, "other problems, such as not being able to find the button to quit the game, are not a result of the 'old build'; these are different issues."

Bucky responded to one player: "We are really at the mercy of certification. We are desperately trying to speed this up," responding to a later call for a hotfix with the text: "On Steam the hotfix was applied 2 days ago, on Xbox we are in the MS certification queue, and on Windows we are in the MS certification queue.

As a player pointed out in this Reddit thread, the Xbox and PC game paths have cross-platform saves, so they are probably running on the same version of the game. According to our feature producer, Mollie Taylor, she has seen friends playing Palworld migrate from Game Pass to Steam to avoid issues such as server max size reduction and menu differences.

Be that as it may, if you want to play the best version of Palworld, you should move to Steam for the time being. As for when we can expect platform parity, Bucky says that "the goal is to bring them to the exact same place," but "we won't achieve that until crossplay is fully compatible. In other words, no one knows for sure. But given the game's huge success, it's highly likely that Microsoft will make Palworld a priority in its push.