Amazon's last MMO import Throne and Liberty gets off to a strong start on Steam despite mixed reviews

But it can't beat Banana game.

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 good start for Throne and Liberty, but its early launch week peak of 326,377 concurrent players pales in companion 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 peak concurrent of 914k players when it arrived in 2021. The key, of course, will be maintaining Throne and Liberty, which both Lost Ark and New World in particular have struggled to do - despite that latter's recent relaunch as New World: Aerturnum.

Throne and Liberty's launch hasn't been without incident either. The game is currently rated Mixed on Steam, with players dinging it for a huge range of issues. From almost inevitable launch week servers woes to more fundamental problems like shallow gameplay. Steam Deck and Linux players have also been frustrated by the arrival of Easy Anti-Cheat rendering the game 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 PS5 with cross-play - 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, 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.