Throne and Liberty, the free-to-play fantasy MMORPG from Korean developer NCSOFT and revealed by Amazon Video games, is off to a giant begin on Steam–though not fairly as massive as Amazon’s two earlier MMOs.
An early-access interval by which gamers may pay to play 5 days early noticed Throne and Liberty’s concurrent participant counts peak at round 56,000. On October 1, when the sport launched for free-to-play gamers, these numbers quickly climbed. Throne of Liberty reached 326,377 concurrent gamers on launch day and for a time was the fourth most-played sport on Steam.
As typically appears to be the case with the launch of a brand new MMO, server woes and login queues plagued Throne and Liberty in its opening hours, with NCSOFT quickly spinning up new servers to satisfy demand. There have been additionally a handful of different points shortly after launch that NCSOFT mentioned it was working to resolve, together with some gamers being unable to create new characters or lacking characters for individuals who performed throughout early entry.
Throne and Liberty’s Steam launch numbers are nothing to sneeze at, however far behind the launch of Amazon’s earlier two MMOs, New World and Lost Ark. New World, internally developed by Amazon, broke Steam data when it launched in 2021 and noticed greater than 913,000 concurrent gamers regardless of its $40 price ticket. Lost Ark, one other free-to-play Korean MMO localized and revealed by Amazon, fared even higher throughout its launch in 2022, hitting 1.3 million concurrent gamers. It’s value noting that not like Lost Ark or New World, Throne and Liberty can also be accessible on PlayStation 5 and Xbox Collection X|S, which means that its Steam concurrent gamers do not paint the total image.
Amazon previous to launch detailed all of the modifications it could be making to Throne and Liberty in comparison with the Korean model, with the purpose of adjusting the sport’s enterprise mannequin to higher match the expectations of Western gamers. These modifications included decreasing the worth of the sport’s battle move and leveling move, in addition to further rewards and the elimination of an non-compulsory subscription known as the Blessing of Solisium. Amazon mentioned it could “consider” how the subscription wanted to alter with a view to “serve the wants of our gamers.”
Throne and Liberty wasn’t even going to be the one MMORPG Amazon revealed in 2024. The juggernaut additionally deliberate to publish the Western model of Bandai Namco’s anime MMO Blue Protocol. The Western launch of Blue Protocol was canceled in August, with the Japanese servers set to go offline in January.
Even when Amazon has a status for creating and publishing MMOs (it is at present engaged on a Lord of the Rings MMO and is remodeling New World for consoles), the corporate is seeking to department out into different genres. It was introduced as a part of Gamescom 2024 that Amazon would publish the co-op dungeon crawler King of Meat.