Lost Ark proves hugely popular ahead of launch as Steam pre-loads soar
Found audience.
Lost Ark is already proving incredibly popular ahead of its full release on 11th February.
The Korean-developed ARPG MMO is on its way to the West courtesy of Amazon Games, following huge success in Korea, Japan and Russia over the past two years.
Steam has already buckled under the weight of pre-loads of the game as acknowledged by the developer, though the situation now appears to be smoother.
While the free-to-play game is due out in full on Friday, Founder's Packs are available to purchase that allow early access and a number of bonus items.
These packs became available on Steam on Tuesday, leading to a spike in bandwidth as players rush to download.
What's more, the game has already seen a peak of over 532,000 concurrent players before that free-to-play release and is soaring up the most played games on the platform.
Over on Twitch, it's proving more popular still with a peak of over 1.2 million viewers so far and on average 810 channels streaming the game. It's currently the ninth most watched game on Twitch.
These numbers will no doubt rise further once the game releases on Friday. The developer is already warning about potential server queues.
The game's popularity in the East has likely contributed to buzz in the West, while delays to Blizzard's Diablo 4 and server issues with Diablo 2 Resurrected have opened a gap in the market for hungry ARPG fans.
Further, Lost Ark marks another huge success for Amazon Games following the release of its MMORPG New World, which similarly had over 500,000 concurrent players at launch.
Though numbers have dipped since, Amazon has outlined improvements to its end-game.