Lost Ark has over 500,000 concurrent players on Steam, and it hasn't even launched yet

gamedeveloper.com:

Lost Ark, the fantasy MMORPG published by Amazon Games in the West, has eclipsed 532,000 peak concurrent players on Steam ahead of its free-to-play launch.

Developed by Smilegate, Lost Ark was fully released in South Korea in 2019 and has now made its way to North America and Europe with the help of Amazon Games.

Although its official free-to-play launch is scheduled for February 11, 2022, players who purchased one of four "founder's packs" were granted access from February 8 -- and it seems plenty of folks took that route.

According to the latest numbers from third-party tracker SteamDB, the title achieved an all-time peak of precisely 532,476 concurrent players yesterday, and currently boasts over 239,000 concurrent players.

While that total is dwarfed by the all-time peaks of titles like PUBG: Battlegrounds and Counter-Strike: Global Offensive -- which have topped 3.2 million and 1.3 million concurrent players, respectively -- it does mean Lost Ark has already beaten the all-time peaks of other popular releases such as Grand Theft Auto V, Apex Legends, Ark: Survival Evolved, and Rust.

The big question is whether Lost Ark can maintain and build on its early momentum in the West. Amazon's other fledgling MMO, New World, launched to similar fanfare last year, pulling in over 913,000 concurrent users at launch before experiencing a dramatic decline. At the time of writing, New World has 25,598 concurrent players and a 24-hour peak of 47,002 concurrent players.