Smilegate’s Lost Ark becomes second most played game on Steam

Smilegate Entertainment Inc.’s Lost Ark has become the second most played game within a couple of days after its launch on Steam, the world’s largest PC game distribution platform.

Lost Ark, a massively multiplayer online role-playing game (MMORPG) released on Feb. 11, has comfortably exceeded 1 million concurrent players after just 24 hours, according to SteamDB.

As of Feb. 13, the English version of the online game produced by Smilegate RPG, a subsidiary of South Korea’s Smilegate Entertainment, briefly ranked first with a peak of 1.33 million simultaneous players on Steam.

That marks the first time for a game developed by a Korean game publisher to surpass the 1 million level and the second-most concurrently played game in Steam’s history since Krafton Inc.’s game, PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds (PUBG), set an all-time high record of 3.25 million concurrent players about four years ago.

Only five games have so far reached over 1 million concurrent players on Steam, including Counter-Strike: Global Offensive (1.3 million), Dota 2 (1.05 million) and Cyberpunk 2077 (1.05 million).

POPULAR EVEN BEFORE F2P RELEASE

Lost Ark’s accomplishment comes as the game was already struggling with long server queues during its early access period ahead of the official free-to-play (F2P) release on Feb. 11.

According to industry officials, Smilegate sold more than 1.5 million extra Founders Pack products worth 90 billion won ($75 million) in just two days before the launch of the English version.

Lost Ark was first released in Korea in 2018 and later in Japan and Russia, after seven years of development with a budget of more than 100 billion won.

After finding huge success there, Lost Ark publisher Smilegate partnered with Amazon to bring the hit game to the US and Europe.

Lost Ark is an action role-playing game, which includes 15 playable characters and is played from a top-down perspective. It’s about exploring levels filled with huge numbers of enemies and lots of loot.

Analysts said behind Lost Ark’s success was Smilegate’s strategy to actively reflect online gamers’ requests in upgrading its game product, the peculiar Oriental and Western backgrounds of the game and its state-of-the-art graphic technology.

Smilegate’s other games that have gained popularity across the world include Crossfire and Epic Seven, which have been exported to dozens of countries.

Write to Joo-Wan Kim at kjwan@hankyung.com
In-Soo Nam edited this article.