Lost Ark is an ARPG-MMO mash-up which originally launched in South Korea in 2018. There, it is developed and published by Smilegate, the company behind Crossfire – Asia’s answer to CS:GO and one of the biggest games in China, where it is distributed by Tencent. Lost Ark has also been available in Russia since 2019, and Japan since 2020.

Lost Ark is scheduled for a full release in Europe and North America early next year, published by Smilegate’s chosen partner Amazon Games. It is currently available in closed beta, which is accessible through purchasing a founders pack, starting at $14.99 / £13.20 / €14.99. The game itself, however, is free-to-play.

Lost Ark unlikely to cannibalize New World audiences

Although both titles draw from the MMO genre, they are otherwise quite different. New World, Amazon's home-grown title which launched in September this year, is more of a conventional MMORPG with a colonial, low-fantasy flavour. Lost Ark, on the other hand, is heavily inspired by action RPGs – namely Blizzard’s Diablo – but retains the aesthetically-pleasing, provocative art style that is synonymous with East Asian games. New World has a more traditionally Western aesthetic that arguably has better potential in a Western market, whereas Asian MMOs sometimes have difficulty reaching beyond their niche audience.

Lost Ark is already an established and successful game in South Korea, and with that comes a level of polish that New World is likely to be chasing for months – even years – to come. As is typical of an MMORPG, the popularity of Lost Ark ebbs and flows: losing steam and resurging again with the delivery of fresh content. Acting as the Western publishing partner for Smilegate allows Amazon to gain valuable experience in the operation of a persistent, live-service game without the weight of its development. New World will surely be Amazon’s main focus, and expertise garnered via Lost Ark will help to shape its future.

Amazon’s games content strategy is bold and risk-laden

MMOs are difficult games in many respects: they are time and resource intensive, and the most successful – of which there are few - have typically employed a subscription model, a form of monetisation that has become increasingly unpalatable thanks to the explosion of free-to-play. Amazon has spent the best part of the last decade experimenting with mobile titles, without standout successes, but its more recent offerings demonstrate a decisive shift into PC gaming. This shift is something Amazon announced back in 2014, and so it is several years in the making, and with it comes a new focus on more involving but challenging content: for both the players and the creators.

PC gamers are perhaps the most traditional and discerning, and so the decision to target these players is risky. Crucible, Amazon’s now-cancelled multiplayer third-person shooter, drew from numerous genres like MOBAs and battle royales and suffered an identity crisis. This underlined the fact that innovation in the PC space, where content types are deeply entrenched, is difficult. Netflix, by comparison, is currently taking far more tentative steps into gaming through mobile games built on in-house IP. Although Amazon also ventured into the mobile space initially, it was not as high-profile or momentous. Triumph in the PC space – and the MMO space more specifically – can be deeply rewarding, though. Successful games often generate dedicated player communities who will offer long-term support and loyalty to a brand.