The past couple of years have seen a bit of a mixed back when it comes to big gaming releases – some have soared to incredible success and have become global phenomena like Valorant and its rapid emergence into the esports space, where others have fallen flat with disappointment like Battlefield 2042. It may be signaling of changing times as mobile gaming platforms continue to grow in traffic by large numbers, online games of chance like those found at casio genie have been leading the way as legislation changes and users’ numbers grow too, but that doesn’t mean there isn’t room for more dedicated games to succeed too.
(Image from invisioncommunity.co.uk)
Lost Ark has been one of these games to find huge success – having first released in Korea in 2019, this theme park MMORPG had been long anticipated in the western market for quite some time but with no publisher on board and somewhat dramatic changes required to the game to make it suitable for this new audience, but it seems the concerns over whether or not the game would land have been answered. In the beta release for the west, the game was able to pull in over 100,000 concurrent users during its three-day access period, and the three-day early access numbers were just as impressive too.
The real test would be the launch of the free to play access for players not willing to purchase a founder’s pack – the weekend following release would answer any questions critics may have however as the game quickly rose to the second higher number of concurrent players on gaming platform steam by surpassing 1.3 million active users and nearing 1.4 million and becoming a huge success – but it hasn’t all been smooth sailing. Amazon Game Studios were granted the publishing rights for the game but did alert some users concerns as both previous releases by the studio, Crucible and New World, had major issues with long queue times and server capacity and is something that has become a problem in Lost Ark too – some of the European servers have experience login queues up to 30,000 players long and taking an entire day to get through, and whilst a solution is being put in place it will still be a long wait for those hoping to get a good days’ worth of playtime in.
In some essence, the game is suffering from its own success and doesn’t look to be slowing – interest will almost certainly wane over time but for now the game is thriving and showing how the MMORPG market is still very much alive.
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