Lost Ark engages most Aussie gamers but latency and connection drops remain high
CommsDay 22 February 2022 – EXCLUSIVE
One of the most successful recent game launches, Lost Ark, already has the most engagement with Australia gamers, Canopus Networks has revealed exclusively to
CommsDay. But high latencies outside the US and long queue times has set developer Amazon Game Studios scurrying to deploy more servers, opening up an entirely new region in Europe. Australian gamers are less fortunate with no planned dedicated servers in the region.
The game shot to popularity after it was made “free-to-play” on 11 Feb, making it the second most played game in Steam history after just 24 hours, comfortably passing one million concurrent players.
Canopus Networks, the Australian Al company that analyses network traffic for telcos, pushed the signature for the new game across its customer base within the first week of release.
CEO Vijay Sivaraman told CommsDay shed some light on the popularity and engagement of Lost Ark across a 100,000 user footprint in NSW.
“Over the weekend of 18-20 Feb, approximately 4.2% of gaming houses played Lost Ark, making it the 10th most popular title; by comparison 45.7% of gaming households play Fortnite,” he told CommsDay. “However, in terms of engagement, Lost Ark tops the charts at an average of 11.1 hours per gaming household over the weekend, just ahead of World of Warcraft (10.9 hours) and well ahead of Fortnite (4.5 hours).
Canopus further identified that 99% of Lost Ark game-time by NSW players was on servers located in the US (average latency of 183ms), and the remaining 1% on servers located in Europe (Denmark and Ireland) with average latency 287ms. “[Media reports show] the primary owner of the game Smilegate RPG has not given Amazon the legal rights to publish the game in Australia, blocking the publisher from generating dedicated servers in Oceania,” he said. “Australian gamers have complained on forums that the high latency makes the game unplayable, which could explain why Lost Ark has few (though highly engaged) gamers in Australia.
Simon Dux, CommsDay