Pocketpair has a new fan favorite in Palworld: Sekhmet finished first in the studio’s latest global popularity poll with 49,637 votes. Solenne came next with 37,425, Chillet followed with 34,625, and Verdash landed last with 1,479.
The result matters now because Pocketpair paired the poll with a teaser for a winter update called Palworld: Side by Side, and that is the name players are searching for after the reveal. The studio showed three human silhouettes in the teaser, setting off a round of guesses about who they might be and giving the poll an immediate second life beyond a simple ranking.
Rachel Weber, who reported the poll results, noted that the list is part of a broader popularity ranking that also covered characters, not only Pals. That context explains why the top finishers drew so much attention: Pocketpair has already used fan voting to shape the game before, turning Zoe into a recruitable companion after last year’s poll.
The new tease is where the neat story gets messier. Pocketpair has not confirmed whether Side by Side is the same update John “Bucky” Buckley referred to at Gamescom in August, when he said the team was working on something players had wanted for a long time and that it would not require a restart to experience. He also said the timing was chosen to avoid November and that marketing would begin soon.
That leaves one immediate question hanging over the winter update: whether the three silhouettes are Auri, Zoe and Saya, as Reddit theories suggested, or whether Pocketpair is holding back something else entirely. For now, the poll has done what it was meant to do — show which Pal global players care about most — and the teaser has done what teasers do best, which is turn a vote tally into a guessing game.
