On Steam, a platform on which Crimson Desert will have sold a good number of copies, the game has registered a peak of 239,000 concurrent players, a figure that is not bad at all for a single-player action-adventure title that does not have a major franchise behind it. It is true that Crimson Desert began as a prequel to Black Desert in the form of an MMO, but ended up changing genres and becoming an independent product that according to Pearl Abyss has given life to a new intellectual property.
Less than a month ago, Resident Evil Requiem, the new installment of a consolidated and very popular saga, added 344,000 simultaneous users on Steam and 5 million copies sold between consoles and PC. If we look at the records of other projects in the hands of a Korean studio, we will see that role-playing game soulslike Lies of P and action-adventure title Stellar Blade recorded 30,000 and 192,000 concurrent players, respectively. Stellar Blade sold one million units on PC in three days and just yesterday Lies of P announced that it had reached 4 million copies across all platforms.
As many other single-player games such as Cyberpunk 2077, the latest installments of Resident Evil, The Witcher 3, Clair Obscur: Expedition 33 or Kingdom Come: Deliverance II have shown us, a good start is only the beginning. According to Alinea AnalyticsCrimson Desert had sold more than 400,000 copies on Steam prior to its release, generating gross revenues in excess of $20 million. This analysis company maintains that the game could exceed $150 million.
However, the Crimson Desert development team can't sit around counting copies because player reception hasn't been as enthusiastic as sales. On Steam the reviews are «varied» and there are many who complain about the controls or the presence of several tedious secondary missions. In addition, gamers have had to download large updates, despite the fact that many games suffer, while users with an Intel graphics card have been left without support.