The new MMORPG Lost Ark was released on February 11th for free for all players. After some initial difficulties and a slightly delayed launch, the player numbers are regularly breaking records.
Update 13.02.2022 02:30:
On February 12th at 9 PM, Lost Ark attracted over 1.3 million concurrent players in the MMORPG. And that was just through Steam. There has only been one other title on the platform that has been able to achieve this.
Following PUBG with 3.3 million concurrent players, Lost Ark now ranks directly behind it, currently with 1.325 million concurrent fans. It has now also surpassed Dota 2 and CSGO, which are now behind the MMORPG.
Lost Ark is the first MMORPG to exceed the one million player mark on Steam. However, this unfortunately shows in the waiting queues. Currently, the servers are absolutely full, and new players are having a hard time starting at all.
As a note: The player numbers also include data from players who are in a queue. Here, the game time already starts counting, even if you can’t really play.
What happened before Lost Ark? After serious technical problems on launch day, the game could not go live until several hours after the planned release.
Although the server launch for us was already in the middle of the night, around 1 AM, Lost Ark attracted an incredible 984,000 concurrent players. This was already about 70,000 more than the biggest MMORPG competitor, New World, had achieved at its peak. However, it should be mentioned that New World had to be purchased while Lost Ark can be played for free.
But the number could not reach that magical million yesterday. About an hour after the release, player numbers began to decline again. Nevertheless, Lost Ark already achieved about 5 times more players than the developer expected.
Is this the first MMORPG that could achieve this? No, but it is the first that has achieved it in a verifiable and recognizable way on the Steam platform. According to its own statements, the Asia MMORPG MIR 4 reached over a million concurrent gamers, but not solely through Steam, rather spread across all platforms.
This is also conceivable for the other major MMORPGs, but there are no exact numbers for FFXIV and WoW.
Successful on Twitch: Lost Ark is breaking records, not just on Steam. The game is also taking off on Twitch. Already twice, on February 8th and February 11th, the category Lost Ark attracted over a million viewers.
With this, the game surpasses the records of genre peers like New World or World of Warcraft. Just the streamer Asmongold had over 420,000 concurrent viewers during the server downtime on February 11th. At that time, that was more than the entire category of League of Legends.
Also, on February 12th at 9 PM, Lost Ark was again the biggest category on Twitch with over 600,000 viewers.
How is the game received? On Steam, the game is doing quite well. From the 96% positive ratings before the launch and all the problems on February 11th, it is now a bit removed from that. With 18,739 reviews, Lost Ark currently holds the “Mostly Positive” stamp, and 73% of the ratings are positive.
Many negative reviews, however, refer to the ongoing server issues, waiting queues, and shop crashes occurring in-game. A major point of criticism is also that servers are sometimes locked for new players, preventing them from playing with their friends.
Do you think Lost Ark will continue to rise, or will this MMORPG soon fall off in your opinion? How many players do you think will remain loyal to Lost Ark and continue to roam through the world of Arkesia, even after the initial hype? Feel free to leave us your comments at MeinMMO.
