Lost Ark now has over 20 million players globally

Image for Lost Ark now has over 20 million players globally
(Image credit: Amazon Games)

Lost Ark was a hit when it launched in Korea, and has since been made available in Russia and Japan, but apparently this year's western release has doubled its numbers. English-language publisher Amazon Games announced that Lost Ark now has over 20 million global users, and "currently more than 10 million of Lost Ark's [players] come from North America, Europe, South America, and Australia."

The day after Lost Ark arrived on Steam it peaked at 1,325,305 concurrent players, knocking CS:GO off its position to take the record for Steam's second-highest all-time peak. (PUBG remains number one.) That said, in recent weeks the number of blatant bots wearing the same outfits and following the same paths between quest givers—sometimes blinking from place to place or even taking shortcuts through walls—has grown. Amazon Games announced it was banning over a million accounts for running bots earlier this month, but they can still be seen in hub areas like Luterra Castle and Prideholme.

Lost Ark's western version doesn't yet contain everything the current Korean version has, with more additions due to be rolled out in the coming months. For starters, we're getting more storyline and endgame activities in March, and beyond that more of the advanced classes are coming. That seems to have been delayed, however: a recent tweet on the official Lost Ark account says, "we are currently making adjustments to our upcoming content roadmap based on player progression data. We will be sharing an updated roadmap following our March update." 

Jody Macgregor
Weekend/AU Editor

Jody's first computer was a Commodore 64, so he remembers having to use a code wheel to play Pool of Radiance. A former music journalist who interviewed everyone from Giorgio Moroder to Trent Reznor, Jody also co-hosted Australia's first radio show about videogames, Zed Games. He's written for Rock Paper Shotgun, The Big Issue, GamesRadar, Zam, Glixel, Five Out of Ten Magazine, and Playboy.com, whose cheques with the bunny logo made for fun conversations at the bank. Jody's first article for PC Gamer was about the audio of Alien Isolation, published in 2015, and since then he's written about why Silent Hill belongs on PC, why Recettear: An Item Shop's Tale is the best fantasy shopkeeper tycoon game, and how weird Lost Ark can get. Jody edited PC Gamer Indie from 2017 to 2018, and he eventually lived up to his promise to play every Warhammer videogame.