Lost Ark proves hugely popular ahead of launch as Steam pre-loads soar

eurogamer.net:

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.

We are now seeing improvements in players being able to download and decrypt the game, and have confirmed this with the team at Valve. We will continue to monitor the situation.

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.

While you may experience queue times on some servers as they begin to fill up, please be aware that there are servers in each region with no or low queue times that you can join if you want to enter Arkesia more quickly!

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