Last year, Amazon Games had already signed the biggest launch of the year with New World and its peak of 913,634 concurrent players, which remains the 6th largest gathering ever recorded on the platform of Valve. Who would have thought that this performance would be beaten a few months later? Already available in Korea, Russia and Japan, Lost Ark saw its flattering reputation precede it: for its launch in Europe, North America, Latin America and Oceania, Smilegate RPG’s free MMO signed a peak of 1,325,305 players connected simultaneously this weekend, which allows it to break the records of titles like Counter-Strike: Global Offensive (1,308,963), Dota 2 (1,295,114) and Cyberpunk 2077 (1,054,388). In fact, only one game in the history of Steam has done better than Lost Ark, and that is PUBG, untouchable when the battle royale phenomenon exploded (3,257,248 concurrent players in January 2018).
If the free-to-play formula of Lost Ark contributed to this performance, remember that the Smilegate game had already gathered more than 500,000 players simultaneously even before its official release as part of the early access reserved for owners of a paid founder pack. In fact, Lost Ark occupies half of the top 10 highest-grossing items on Steam for the week of February 7-13. Lost Ark has also easily topped the most-watched games on Twitch for the past week.
As you can imagine, with such a start, Amazon Games and Smilegate RPG are facing overloaded servers and considerable queues, not to mention maintenance, a frustration that is also causing the evaluations of the users (69% of ratings are positive at the time of this writing). On Sunday, an article was published on the game’s official website to announce the establishment of a brand new region of servers in Europe, but without advancing on an availability date.
- Also Read | The Lost Ark review by AoNoShiro