Despite issues on launch day, the Korean free-to-play MMO Lost Ark continues to shatter record after record. The game previously managed to break 500,000 concurrent players on Steam during early access. Within 24 hours of release, it managed to break the all-time concurrent player records of CS-GO and Dota 2 with a staggering 1,324,761 players. Now, Amazon Games and Smilegate have issued a press release confirming that Lost Ark has surpassed 20 million global users.
In the press release, Amazon confirms that the MMO added 4.7 million users just three days after launching in Europe, North America, South America, and Australia. Less than one month post-launch, that number has jumped to over 10 million, doubling Lost Ark‘s total global playerbase. According to Wongil Chi, the CEO of Smilegate, that number is “steadily increasing.”
“Overall, the excitement surrounding Lost Ark from around the world is quickly gaining steam, as evidenced by the growing number of global players,” said Christoph Hartmann, the Vice President of Amazon Games. “Together with Smilegate, we are committed to supporting the growing community with a robust roadmap of updates in the years to come.”
While Lost Ark has OpenCritic and Metacritic scores of 82 and 81 respectively, not everything has gone smoothly. In late February, some players took to the game’s official forum to report that their paid benefits had disappeared early. While Amazon responded indicating that a fix was in the works, no progress seems to have been made.
The game’s massive popularity has also caused a major problem in Europe. Upon Lost Ark‘s launch, Amazon announced that fifteen new servers would be added across all regions to help ease congestion. While a new Europe West server was added, Smilegate noted that European players wouldn’t be seeing a change in queue times any time soon, as the Europe Central region is now at capacity.
Lost Ark was fully released in its free-to-play format on February 11, 2021.
