Smilegate's newly launched MMO, Lost Ark – published by Amazon Games – has only been out for a day, but it's already one of the biggest games to ever hit Steam.
All day long the concurrent user record - that is, the tally of the number of players all online and playing at the same time - has been growing and growing on SteamDB, and - at the time of writing - it currently sits at an incredible peak of 1,321,363 players (and it's changed three times since I started writing this article!).
Not only does that make it the most played game on the platform right now - CS:GO is currently second with 1.3 million concurrent players, and Dota 2 is third with 1.2 – but it now boasts the second-highest concurrent peak ever, too, topping games like Cyberpunk 2077 and Amazon's own New World, which currently has a peak of 913K.
Only PUGB is keeping Lost Ark from the top spot… although with a staggering record of 3.2 million concurrent players, PUBG Corp. probably doesn't have much to worry about just yet.
🚀 #LostArk is now the second most concurrently played game on Steam of all time!Beating CS:GO (1.30mil) and Dota 2 (1.29mil) peaks.https://t.co/EmOFD0tsUyFebruary 12, 2022
Lost Ark is a class-based isometric ARPG, not dissimilar to games like Diablo that pits you against hordes of enemies and even other players. Interestingly enough, though, it also offers less taxing pursuits, too, such as fishing, mining, and even archeology.
Lost Ark's free-to-play launch is live following a pair of launch-day delays, but publisher Amazon Games now says the "deployment issues" affecting launch have been rectified with a hotfix.
"If Lost Ark stayed under your radar until its near-instant climb up the Steam charts, allow us to fill you in," Ali explains in his article, What is Lost Ark and Why Is It Blowing up on Steam?.
"Released in 2019 by the RPG wing of South Korean developer Smilegate – best known for its hit FPS Crossfire (which arrives in the West tomorrow as an Xbox Series X exclusive) – its worldwide rollout has, until now, been pretty limited. A Russian region is currently in open beta, while closed beta registration is available in Japan. If this is the first you're hearing of Lost Ark, then you also need to know that it isn't a 'traditional' MMO by any stretch of the imagination."
If you've got some serious time to kill, here what we think are the best mmorpg titles you can play in 2022.
