But it can’t beat Banana game.
Image credit: NCSoft/Amazon Games
Throne and Liberty – the latest South Korean free-to-play fantasy MMO to get a western release courtesy of Amazon Games – is off to a strong start this week, hovering near the top of Steam’s concurrent charts (albeit still behind that infernal Banana game) despite mixed reviews.
Currently, Throne and Liberty – which promises exploration and “massive-scale combat” for “thousands of players at once” across a “dynamic” open world – is Steam’s sixth most played game, with 251K concurrent players according to SteamDB. That puts it just behind Black Myth: Wukong, Banana, PUBG, and perennial Steam favourites Dota 2 and Counter-Strike 2.
It’s a strong start for Throne and Liberty, but its early launch week peak of 326,377 concurrent players pales in comparison to Amazon’s other previous releases. Lost Ark, for instance, managed an all-time high of 1.3m concurrents at launch in 2022, while New World saw a peak concurrent of 914k players when it arrived in 2021. The key, of course, will be maintaining player interest in Throne and Liberty, which both Lost Ark and New World in particular have struggled to do – despite the latter’s recent relaunch as New World: Aerturnum.
Throne and Liberty’s arrival hasn’t been without incident either. The game is currently rated Mixed on Steam, with players dinging it for a whole range of issues – from almost inevitable launch week servers woes to more fundamental complaints, including shallow gameplay design. Steam Deck and Linux players have also been frustrated by the arrival of Easy Anti-Cheat, rendering Throne and Liberty unplayable on those systems – albeit seemingly temporarily, with Rock Paper Shotgun reporting the issue now seems resolved.
All the above only applies to Steam, of course; but if Throne and Liberty has a similar impact on consoles (it’s also available on Xbox Series X/S and PlayStation 5 with cross-play supported) Amazon will no doubt be wanting to shout about it soon.
Throne and Liberty, perhaps surprisingly given how much corporations love the old brand synergy stuff, isn’t one of the games being immortalised in Amazon’s upcoming Secret Level anthology series – although the company’s New World: Aeternum does make an appearance, alongside the likes of Mega Man, Sifu, Pac-Man, Spelunky, and, er, Concord.
