The launch of Lost Ark in Western countries is one that's been a long, long time coming. It took eight years for the game to get properly localised and released in the West, thanks to the work of Amazon Game Studios. Unsurprisingly, the ARPG MMO saw a massive influx of players just as it went live.
On Steam, where Lost Ark is available exclusively, the game peaked at 532,476 concurrent players, according to SteamDB. In fact, the initial pre-load unlock and new downloads took players longer than they should because Steam's servers got hammered.
Lost Ark is free-to-play, but you can only access it now by buying any of the four founder's packs, which start at $15 and go as high as $100. The actual free-to-play launch doesn't kick off until Friday, February 11 - so we can only imagine how much higher those numbers are going to get.