Lost Ark had a historic debut weekend on Steam

By Otto Kratky February 14, 2022

Despite launching only three days ago, Lost Ark has already dominated Steam, becoming the second most played game ever on the platform.

Anyone who’s never heard of Lost Ark before today and might be wondering why the Diablo-inspired MMO is climbing Steam’s rankings so fast can’t be blamed. The game was originally released in South Korea in December 2019. Lost Ark was published in the United States and Europe on February 11 thanks to a partnership between developer Smilegate and Amazon. Within a day, the game rose through Steam’s concurrent player base, and, according to SteamDB, became the online retailer’s second most played game ever.

While that title is impressive, the numbers behind it are even more so. The current king of concurrent players of all time on Steam is PUBG: Battlegrounds, which has an all-time concurrent player peak of over 3 million. Lost Ark, comparatively, has had less than half that many players at its peak, topping off at 1,325,305 players. In reaching its current spot, the game has beaten out other massively popular games, including Counter-Strike: Global Offensive, Dota 2, Valheim, and even Amazon’s own MMO, New World.

Outside of its all-time peak, Lost Ark is still drawing in thousands of concurrent players at a time. At the time of writing, the game is likewise the second-most played game on Steam with over 825,000 players. It’s beaten out only by Counter-Strike: Global Offensive, although only by a mere 21,000 players.

Lost Ark‘s success could spell out bad news for New World, which has floundered since its launch. The MMO has only reached a peak of 48,228 players over the past 24 hours, a statistic that could drop even further if players are lured away by Lost Ark.

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Otto Kratky is a freelance writer with many homes. You can find his work at Digital Trends, GameSpot, and Gamepur. If he's…

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