Lost Ark is a free-to-play Korean massively multiplayer online action role-playing game (MMORPG) released in South Korea in 2019 and will soon be coming to the Americas and Europe, with Amazon publishing the game in these regions.
Lost Ark is played from an isometric viewpoint with an added MMO aspect, which essentially makes it a fusion of Diablo and World of Warcraft. The game promises to keep players busy for hours on end with tons of content.
The game is currently in its pre-release stage, playable only by those who bought the Founder’s Pack, and will only become free-to-play on 11 February. Despite this, the game is already a massive hit, with Steam Charts showing a staggering 505,675 concurrent players in the last 24 hours.
It is currently the second most-played game according to Steam’s rankings, as well as the sixth most-played game of all time!
Suffering from success
On Tuesday, 8 February, people’s frantic efforts to preload Lost Ark resulted in Steam’s bandwidth peaking at 45.6 Tbps (that’s 5.7 terabytes of data per second!) and this consequently caused slow downloads for the entire Lost Ark userbase.
Steam’s download bandwidth usage peaked at 45.6 Tbps on 8 February (sourced from Valve)
Launch day is likely to bring another massive influx of players, and therefore players have been warned that they can expect to be waiting in queues to join the most popular servers.
South African gamers’ dilemma
Unfortunately for South African gamers, Lost Ark won’t be available for download from Steam’s SA store.
Lost Ark’s store page on South African Steam.
There is still hope, though. Considering how popular Lost Ark is likely to become and Amazon’s previous MMORPG New World’s massive success and consequent availability in South Africa, you can expect the game to come to Steam’s SA store eventually.
Local servers for the game are, however, unlikely.
Read: The best game in March you’ve probably never heard of
