Throne and Liberty, the free-to-play fantasy MMORPG from Korean developer NCSOFT and published by Amazon Games, is off to a big start on Steam–though not quite as big as Amazon’s two previous MMOs.
An early-access period in which players could pay to play five days early saw Throne and Liberty’s concurrent player counts peak at around 56,000. On October 1, when the game launched for free-to-play players, those numbers rapidly climbed. Throne of Liberty reached 326,377 concurrent players on launch day and for a time was the fourth most-played game on Steam.
As often seems to be the case with the launch of a new MMO, server woes and login queues plagued Throne and Liberty in its opening hours, with NCSOFT rapidly spinning up new servers to meet demand. There were also a handful of other issues shortly after launch that NCSOFT said it was working to resolve, including some players being unable to create new characters or missing characters for those who played during early access.
Throne and Liberty’s Steam launch numbers are nothing to sneeze at, but far behind the launch of Amazon’s previous two MMOs, New World and Lost Ark. New World, internally developed by Amazon, broke Steam records when it launched in 2021 and saw more than 913,000 concurrent players despite its $40 price tag. Lost Ark, another free-to-play Korean MMO localized and published by Amazon, fared even better during its launch in 2022, hitting 1.3 million concurrent players. It is worth noting that unlike Lost Ark or New World, Throne and Liberty is also available on PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X|S, meaning that its Steam concurrent players don’t paint the full picture.
Amazon prior to launch detailed all the changes it would be making to Throne and Liberty compared to the Korean version, with the goal of adjusting the game’s business model to better fit the expectations of Western players. Those changes included lowering the price of the game’s battle pass and leveling pass, as well as additional rewards and the removal of an optional subscription called the Blessing of Solisium. Amazon said it would “evaluate” how the subscription needed to change in order to “serve the needs of our players.”
Throne and Liberty wasn’t even going to be the only MMORPG Amazon published in 2024. The juggernaut also planned to publish the Western version of Bandai Namco’s anime MMO Blue Protocol. The Western release of Blue Protocol was canceled in August, with the Japanese servers set to go offline in January.
Even if Amazon has a reputation for creating and publishing MMOs (it’s currently working on a Lord of the Rings MMO and is reworking New World for consoles), the company is looking to branch out into other genres. It was announced as part of Gamescom 2024 that Amazon would publish the co-op dungeon crawler King of Meat.
