Lost Ark becomes the second most played game in Steam history after just 24 hours

theverge.com:

Lost Ark has comfortably passed 1 million concurrent players after just 24 hours, becoming the second most played game in Steam history by concurrent counts. The Diablo-like MMO launched yesterday in the West, after Amazon Games collaborated with Smilegate RPG to localize and translate Lost Ark and make it available in English. It has now passed concurrent records for both Counter-Strike: Global Offensive and Dota 2, which regularly dominate the top of Steam’s most-played games.

Lost Ark is so popular right now that it has experienced server issues and there’s a queue just to start playing. SteamDB lists concurrent players of Lost Ark at 1,311,842, passing CS:GO’s record of 1,308,963 players and Dota 2’s of 1,295,114. It’s not clear exactly how many of those players are actually actively playing the game and not sitting in a server queue, though.

Either way, it’s now second place on the top concurrent list behind only PUGB. It still has a long way to go to beat PUBG’s all-time peak of 3,257,248 players. Lost Ark is a second huge hit for Amazon Games, after New World set a concurrent record of 913,634 players four months ago.

Lost Ark was originally released in 2019 in South Korea, and has millions of active players in South Korea, Russia, and Japan. It’s free-to-play and has also quickly risen to the top of Twitch, overtaking the popular Just Chatting category.