The Lost Ark steam charts have been crazy throughout 2022 beating the likes of CS:GO and Dota 2. After an all time high con-current player count in January, Lost Ark has steadily increased it’s popularity over the last few months.
Reaching over 1 million active players at peak hour, the game has been topping the steam charts with over 400 million hours played.
Although the game is extremely popular, there has been an infestation of bots that are inflating the player count and the servers.
The game is also extremely popular on twitch with over a million viewers at it’s all time peak when the game was released back in February.
In terms of overall player count, Lost Ark has also surpassed PUBG, GTA5, and Apex Legends. All of these games are well-known free-to-play successes on steam.
Is Lost Ark Steam Charts Incorrect?
Steam Charts is a very accurate tool when it comes to data analytics of players on steam.
It shows trending games where the 24 hour % change has been drastic, top games with the most current players and top records which shows games with the highest peak players.
Currently Lost Ark is sitting at #2 for top records with over 1.3 million peak players in Feb 2022 and #1 in Top games with over 800k current players and 400 million+ hours played.
There is no doubt that the launch of Lost Ark was heavily anticipated and that some of the expectations were met upon the release of the full game.
Since botting and a few other incidents, the active real player base has taken a nose dive and has been replaced by artifical bots.
During March and April there was a large dip in player base, likely due to unmet expectations, bugs or other timely events. However this was all quickly recovered back in May and has been steadily increasing ever since.
This recovery is most likely due to a large influx of bot accounts and not players brought back from a big update.
Currently Lost Ark does not have sufficient anti botting software like runescape, so many players have been taking advantage of this to progress faster at the game.
I have never seen this player count behavior from a game before which shows that this game has something unique about it which bots can be utilised to gain from.
People are speculating that the game only has roughly 60k real players con-currently playing. If this is the case then the game has managed to drive away over a million players since launch.
A farm of daily quests usually takes only 20-25minutes which is one the main things people do, so lesser con-current player counts are to be expected.
Some players have blamed the decrease in Lost Ark players due to bad staff, lack of transparency and bad management.
Afterall, this botting problem shown on steam charts will only be stopped if the game studios behind Lost Ark will actually dedicate resources to anti botting software.
Many players are claiming Lost Ark to be a dead game now because of the lack of real players, but some people are still holding out hope that the data is more accurate than we think.
People have started to compare the numbers to other MMO games such as FF14 to see if the game is truely in a dying trend or not.
Either way I think the game is still a lot of fun for some people but it is definitely not reaching over 800k concurrent live players and no bots on steam.
Steam has a large western playerbase and I dont think it’s likely that they are all playing Lost Ark over the other big games.
Also read the best aim trainers on steam.
