Crimson Desert

Pearl Abyss

Just because a game is huge, that doesn’t mean that players will stick around necessarily. And for a supposed “just okay” game that didn’t impress critics, Crimson Desert is doing phenomenally well.

In its first month of release, Crimson Desert has retained over half its concurrent players, a wild marker for a single-player game, as those normally have understandably rapid falloff. But Crimson Desert is now in the territory of, and just edging out, a game like Elden Ring, which had slightly less retention in its first month (though it was still stellar).

However, I think Crimson Desert deserves even a little more credit here. It launched at $70 compared to Elden Ring’s $60, part of this new, widespread price increase in the industry.

Second, Crimson Desert has no reason to do a second playthrough to do a new run or make a new build, whereas Elden Ring has loads of different options for that. It’s also not like you can start over and play the game as Damiane or Oongka (at least not yet). Crimson Desert has such a hard ending that you can literally kill every single enemy on the map and have nothing left to fight. I haven’t even seen so much as a wolf in the last 20 hours.

This is not some sort of all-time record, of course. I think that honor may go to Baldur’s Gate 3, which has the most retention of a single-player (mostly) game I’ve ever seen, which is still hitting 75,000 concurrent peaks almost three years after release, and it had a much lower first-month drop than either Elden Ring or Crimson Desert.

I’m certainly not saying Crimson Desert is a better game than Baldur’s or Elden Ring, just that it has clearly sunk its claws into a playerbase, and that has resulted in 5 million copies sold so far. I also do not expect it to have anywhere near the type of long, long, long-term stickiness of Baldur’s or Elden, the latter of which is still doing 50,000 peaks when it came out four years ago.

But this is undeniably impressive, and I do think that at the rate Pearl Abyss is patching and adding pretty significant content to the game, this could continue for some time. They’re about to make enemy forts and bosses replayable, and I expect they will both add a New Game+ option and make DLC at some point in the future.

I love the game. I am approaching 300 hours (two-week pre-launch review period included), and I find myself just roaming around, fighting remaining bandits or scanning scholars to steal skill points from to sink some points into Damiane, finally. Hunting down the last few armor sets or legendary weapons I don’t have. Gamble crafting gears. Truly, there’s practically nothing to do, and I still just want to…exist in the world.

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Pick up my sci-fi novels the Herokiller series and The Earthborn Trilogy.