Update: Lost Ark numbers recently beat CS:GO and Dota 2’s; the game is now the second-highest played game with peak player records with 1,325,305 players. Here’s the latest ranking as of 13 February:

1. PUBG: Battlegrounds – 3,257,248
2. Lost Ark – 1,325,305
3. Counter-Strike: Global Offensive – 1,308,963
4. Dota 2 – 1,295,114
5. Cyberpunk 2077 – 1,054,388
6. New World – 913,634

Original story

The latest MMORPG from Amazon Game Studios and Smilegate is a big hit a day after its official launch.

Lost Ark is doing record numbers at the moment, hitting a peak of over a million concurrent players on its launch day and beyond. This is in spite of its current server issues.

It’s the fifth-highest player count Steam has ever recorded, as well as being the only fifth game ever to break over a million concurrent players (via SteamDB). The only games to have reached those numbers and beat Lost Ark are Cyberpunk 2077, Dota 2, Counter-Strike GO, and PUBG. 

It's done it

Lost Ark just became only the 5th game EVER to pass OVER 1 MILLION CONCURRENT PLAYERS ON STEAM

Un-freakin-believable pic.twitter.com/8LWo0v6qFl

— Benji-Sales (@BenjiSales) February 12, 2022

Why is Lost Ark goshdarn popular? It’s free-to-play, it’s got lovely graphics and aesthetics, it’s an easy-to-play isometric action RPG that’s really an MMO, and the classes have cool moves and pretty hair/faces/what-have-yous. The marketing for this in the US and Europe also had a lot to do with its popularity, though it’s arguably not as obnoxious as something like Marvel’s Avengers where a ton of influencers and content creators feign interest in the title.

Of course, that isn’t stopping people from outside those countries to play the English version of Lost Ark. If you’re figuring out how to do that, we’ve got a guide for that.