When it finally did so, players logged in to find that their Lost Ark Gold characters were missing. This was understandably scary for people who have sunk lots of time into the game already, and they eagerly awaited word that they hadn't been wiped completely. Fortunately, after an investigation, Lost Ark confirmed that no characters were missing from the game at all.

Lost Ark originally launched in Korea, Japan, and Russia back in December 2019, but has just recently surpassed 500,000 players on Steam in only these territories. That's a major milestone for the game, and encouraging for anyone hoping for a beautiful, fully-featured MMO with tons of content, as it's been worked on for all this time. The full launch brings it to the rest of the world, and potentially millions more players.

Amazon has been making a big push into the video game industry, though it hasn't seen much success with it just yet. But Lost Ark isn't its first published game, let alone its first MMO: New World was released in September 2021 by Amazon Games Orange County (formerly Relentless Studios). The game was an initial success, but servers quickly got overwhelmed, huge bugs appeared, and the in-game economy was broken. The developers of New World have admitted their mistakes in rushing the game out but the player count has dwindled since launch.

Lost Ark being free-to-play, might be able to circumvent some of this just by having so many players, but its rocky launch was surely not what players wanted to see. The game is packed full of content for anyone, although one has the option to buy founder's packs that give players a number of cheapest Lost Ark Gold rewards to both get them farther in the game and provide in-game rewards to show off.