Smilegate saw 250,000 concurrent users back on November 7th when the open beta of LOST ARK opened (6 servers were brought online which is close to the 40K I previously estimated when they upped the capacity from the lower 20K range).
Since then, CCU’s have exceeded 350,000 (much of that is from the weekend when the servers were slammed by Chinese). Thus the legitimate (Korean only) player numbers are skewed by a six-figure amount at this time.
https://news.joins.com/article/23124672
Still, the game has attracted at least 200,000 actual Korean players which is a much higher number than even I expected for what is effectively a niche in the MMO genre. And this is only a soft launch where those who do not follow the gaming news, will only learn about it once they transition to an official launch along with a broader marketing approach. This is probably some proof that even Korean PC MMO players are looking for something new in that PC space, which has been drying up since at least 2015. What also is helping is the overall high quality production value of the game; something that has been frankly missing from Korean MMO studios.
Bluehole’s Ascent: Infinite Realm will pale in comparison if they do not address optimization problems. Tripod Studios has shown what custom optimization of UE3 can do to squeeze out every last bit of performance from that engine. NCSoft has once again gone silent with Project TL (aka Lineage Eternal) which is leading me to believe that title will never see the light of day. Webzen’s MU Legend is going to have its loyal fans continue playing it in both the Korean and global versions but it’s pretty much lost any relevance in the MMO-ARPG space.
This will leave just Smilegate with LOST ARK, and Echtra Gaming with Torchlight Frontiers, as the two newer main MMO titles, and both just happen to be MMO-ARPG’s. I don’t know yet if Smilegate’s numbers will be enough to cause Bluehole to kneejerk with the in-limbo Devilian IP. The subsidiary that used to be known as Bluehole Ginno, once had this stage to themselves (as well as the original “Korean Diablo” hype aka “Kimchi-Blo”), only to throw it away with bad decisions including partnering with Trion Worlds. Bluehole would need to commit major resources if they were to resurrect the franchise since they would need to rewrite the entire game from the ground up along with revamping systems and designing a ton of new content. As I am telling people, we’ll just need to wait and see what happens with A:IR since that is priority for them to deliver to Kakao.
