There's been a ridiculous amount of talk about Palworld in the Xbox community and beyond over the past few days, and you may have seen some chatter about the PC version being slightly more up-to-date than the version on Xbox.
Some players have been getting frustrated about this, so Palworld Community Manager "Bucky" took to the game's Discord channel to explain the reasons behind it. As spotted by Windows Central, Bucky advised in their responses that the team are "desperately" trying to speed up the Xbox update process, but they're "at the mercy of the certification".
Labrat on Discord: "Where is the hotfix???????"
Bucky: "On Steam, applied 2 days ago. On Xbox, sitting in the MS certification queue."
Tainted Eon: "I just would like parity on the Steam features. Things like DLSS etc..."
Bucky: Some of these things will take extra time...we're really at the mercy of the certification here. We're desperately trying to speed this up.
We've also spotted plenty of discussion surrounding the differences in version numbers between Xbox and PC, but the Community Manager advises this isn't actually relevant. Here's a bit of how this was explained on Discord as well:
"Some features may be slightly different or have different value, but other issues like the missing exit game button (etc) are not a result of an "older build", these are separate issues. In fact, Steam and Xbox will likely never have identical version numbers until the games are brought to be crossplay compatible because at that point they will be the same game internally.
Again, that doesn't mean Xbox is necessarily "behind" or anything, they are just just fundamentally two different versions of the game because of the architecture on Xbox is different. Xbox's version of 1.2 may not be the same as Steam's 1.2 and vice-versa. Of course, the goal is to bring them to the exact same place but this won't be achievable until crossplay is fully compatible."
Ultimately, we've known for a long time now that Xbox updates are never as quick to implement as they are on Steam, so we shouldn't be expecting miracles from the Palworld devs here. There are some known issues that are expected to be fixed in the near future, such as the aforementioned "missing exit game button" and a glitch with compressed audio, and hopefully these will be be part of the recent hotfix that was submitted to Microsoft.
To be honest, the majority of people don't seem too bothered right now anyway! Palworld has been an absolute smash hit across all platforms so far, racking up over 5 million sales over the weekend even despite its inclusion in Xbox Game Pass. This is a game with a very bright future, and keep in mind it's still in early access too!