Amazon Games Celebrates Lost Ark’s Second Anniversary

amazongames.com:

The Team that helped bring Lost Ark to the West looks back at two years of adventures in Arkesia.

“It's hard to believe that the Western version of Lost Ark, published by Amazon Games, is now two years old. We began work on the Western version of Lost Ark in the spring of 2020, right at the start of the pandemic. After initially developing and servicing our own in-house studio titles since Amazon Games was first founded, we couldn't imagine a better and more apt title to serve as the first game we published for a third-party studio than Lost Ark. While we had high hopes for the title, it wasn't an easy task to create and prepare teams to bring Lost Ark, already a huge success in Asia, to Western players and make it a service that lived up to our core value of «Customer Obsession.» Smilegate RPG's trust and support throughout the process was integral to a successful launch. And as you can see from the game's credits page, over 200 people across 40 teams at Amazon Games worked together to ensure that Lost Ark launched in February 2022 with what is currently the fourth-highest concurrent player count in Steam history.

We've worked hard to bring four years of Korean Lost Ark updates and content to players in the West with as little delay as possible. In fact by mid-2024, the gap between the two regions will be as short as six months. While it's always exciting to get great content into the hands of Western players faster and see how they react, we've also found that sometimes faster releases can increase user fatigue and even make games more vulnerable to bots, which is never good for the player experience. During the past few years of working closely with Smilegate RPG, we’ve learned how to strike a balance of releasing content at an optimal cadence that continues to challenge and engage our players.

Since our first anniversary, we've done our best to reduce that fatigue, fight bots, and listen to and reflect on the voice of the community every week. As we enter our