Amazon has launched another blockbuster game.
Lost Ark is a free online game with a magical theme produced by South Korean game company and Crossfire developer Smilegate, which originally landed in the Korean domestic market in 2019 and was released in North America, Europe and other regions through Amazon earlier this year. Since its official launch on the Steam Store, The Lost Ark has led the way in the number of active players for weeks on end, surpassing other popular games such as Counter-Strike: Global Offensive and Eldon's Ring of Law. According to Amazon, the number of registered accounts for The Lost Ark has reached 20 million.
In May 2020, Amazon released the company's first self-developed online game "Crucible", but the game suffered a Waterloo in the market, the number of players continued to decline, and it was discontinued after only 6 months. By comparison, The Lost Ark is now one of the most successful games in Steam history. Last month, the game's Steam also had more than 1.3 million simultaneous online players, ranking second in history, behind the tactical competitive game PUBG. According to data site Steam Charts, in January 2018, the number of simultaneous online players for PUBG reached more than 3 million.
Christoph Hartmann, vice president of Amazon's games division and Laura Sturr, head of studio business operations and player experience, said in a recent interview that the success of "The Lost Ark" was due in part to amazon's lessons learned from the failures of "The Melting Pot" and made the necessary changes to the game for European and American players.
"Looking back now, it's clear that If we get extra time on development, The Melting Pot will benefit in many ways." "We applied what we learned from it to the development of New World," Hartman said, delaying the release date of that game until it was all right. Later, we gave The Lost Ark a few more months, postponed its release to February this year, and managed to attract more players. ”
Stewart added that in order to launch The Lost Ark for European and American players, Amazon's distribution team also needs to redesign its payment system - the Korean version of "The Lost Ark" provides players with a large number of in-app purchase options, such as allowing players to purchase advanced equipment before fighting the final boss, but it has also been accused by some players of "eating ugly".
"We took the time to tweak the model of The Lost Ark so that it met the expectations of Western players and didn't put anyone under pressure to pay." Stewart explains, "In the game, almost all the items that players can spend money to buy can be obtained by earning virtual currency by playing. ”
According to Stuhl, the Steam version of The Lost Ark offers new players more free pets and mounts than the original game. In addition, the publishing team has also made adjustments to the in-game chest design to "make Western players feel that the randomly generated rewards [of the chest] are more consistent and fair."
Next, Amazon must find ways to maintain the activity of Lost Ark players in the game. To that end, Amazon is planning to gradually roll out content that Korean players have experienced earlier.
Like many other online games, The Lost Ark's chat feature is plagued by spam issues. Many players complain that they encounter a large number of spam bots in the game, and others advise users to block and report spammers. To address this, Amazon announced last week that it would remove more than 1 million player accounts that were found to be spamming.
Asked if Amazon wanted to continue making online multiplayer PC games, Hartman gave a positive answer.
"In the future, all games will include certain online multiplayer elements because that's what players want. Players want to play games that can operate for a long time and have a great social element. "In the product roadmap, we'll be developing many different categories of games, but we always want to provide experiences that can grow and evolve with the player community over time." ”