Before its official launch, Lost Ark had already become a phenomenon in the West. Available for more than 3 years in South Korea and Russia in particular, the game had brought together many players, who were able to access the Western version by offering themselves a founder’s pack.
After a technical hiccup of a few hours, preventing Smilegate and Amazon from launching the western version of the game last Friday at 6 p.m., players were finally able to access the free-to-play MMO/Hack’n’slash. Access, however, made difficult by the hundreds of thousands of players trying to connect, creating very long queues on almost all Lost Ark servers, some bugs, and temporary closures of worlds.
Lost Ark has found its way to the West
As of Saturday, the title could boast of having registered more than 983,000 players connected simultaneously, surpassing the excellent launch of New World, developed in-house at Amazon, which had peaked at 913,483 players. With such a score, Lost Ark was ranked 4th titles that have gathered the most players simultaneously on Steam.
It is then behind PUBG (3.23 million players), Dota 2 (1.29 million) and Counter-Strike: Global Offensive (1.3 million). But this Sunday, things changed. Indeed, according to Steam Charts data, Lost Ark is no longer in fourth place in the ranking mentioned above, but in second.
The million! The million! The million!
Released in our regions in the heart of the Winter Olympics, Lost Ark recovers the silver medal, with a colossal peak of 1.324 million players connected simultaneously around 10 p.m.. A score well beyond the expectations of the studio, which, if it has to manage the technical problems linked to this success, estimated that 200,000 peak players would indicate a successful western launch. Still, the success of an MMO is measured over the long termand everything shouldn’t fall apart.
Smilegate’s expectation is to have an average of players between 50,000 and 70,000 players three months later the start.