Lost Ark

The budget figure is unusually well attested for a Korean MMO. Maeil Business News Korea reported at the time of the 2019 Korea Game Awards that Smilegate RPG had launched the game 'after seven years of development with a budget of more than 100 billion won ($85.4 million)', and that it drew 30 billion won in sales in its first two months. That is Korean financial-press reporting rather than a company disclosure, but it is the original source of the figure that circulates everywhere since. Smilegate is privately held, so the closest thing to official financials comes from the operating subsidiary's statutory filings: Smilegate RPG posted 736.9 billion won in revenue and 364.1 billion won in operating profit in 2022, up 50.4% year on year, accounting for 46.7% of group revenue and 56.6% of group operating profit. Those are company figures, not Lost Ark figures, though in practice the subsidiary's business is this game. Amazon Games does not break out per-title revenue, and a widely repeated claim of roughly $500 million in Western revenue for 2022 traces only to forum discussion, not to any named research firm — it is deliberately not recorded here. The Western launch on 11 February 2022 remains the headline event: 1,325,305 concurrent Steam players, at the time second only to PUBG in Steam's history, and Amazon Games' second concurrency record in four months after New World. The decline since has been steep and well documented — the March 2022 average fell about 36% month on month, and by 2026 the game runs at well under one percent of its launch peak, with the North America West region merged into East in October 2024. Time-to-beat is deliberately empty: this is a live MMO with no ending, and HowLongToBeat's completionist figure rests on three submissions.