Lost Ark has been wildly popular since it released February 11th, 2022. The Action MMORPG recently topped 1.3 million concurrent players, topping Amazon Game Studios previous release, New World, which garnered a total of just over 900k concurrent players.
The long-awaited action RPG Lost Ark has exploded in popularity during launch week, with over 1.3 million players, topping Counter-Strike: Global Offensive for 2nd place on the all-time high peak concurrent players on Steam. Whether Lost Ark has the legs to make its way to the number one spot, topping PUBG with over 3 million concurrent users, only time will tell. Initially, Lost Ark’s head start, that began on February 8th managed to gather over 530k concurrent players at its peak, but the rise in concurrent players is undoubtedly due in no small part to the game being free to play, when it went live on the 11th.
Lost Ark has had a relatively positive launch, especially in comparison to many other MMO’s, but not everything has been flawless. Initially Lost Ark’s free to play launch was delayed due to deployment issues, that eventually got fixed. Amazon also ran into an issue where players that created characters during head start, suddenly found their character missing once the game launched.
Lost Ark servers are online and ready for play!We have found a fix for the missing characters and have pushed a new build configuration to Steam, so you’ll need to exit out of your client, update, and reload the game before you can play.
— Lost Ark (@playlostark) February 11, 2022
The auction house on US West was also disabled while the development team addressed the problem.
We are experiencing an issue affecting the Auction House for US West Servers. We have disabled the Auction House for US West until we resolve these issues.We will share more updates as soon as they become available.
— Lost Ark (@playlostark) February 12, 2022
Many players have taken to reddit and twitter to complain about queue times, which was also a common issue during the launch of Amazon Game Studios New World. After a quick expansion of server resources for New World the game has since contracted substantially, merging servers as the concurrent player base has shrunk more than 90%. While much of that was due to constant bugs that plagued New World for months, it’s still far too early to tell if Lost Ark will experience similar growing pains.
If you’re interested in learning more about Lost Ark you can read our in-depth review. Currently Lost Ark has a relatively positive reception from critics, but the ongoing issues have begun to turn some players off, dropping the game to a “mixed review” status on Steam, and an abysmal 4.0 user score on Metacritic at the time of this article. While these are most likely only temporary hiccups, we hope Amazon is able to get a handle on the current issues so that players can hop in and enjoy their time in Lost Ark.
