Still Running — and How You Can Tell
Throne and Liberty Had One Fortnight on the Charts. What Happened After Is the Usual Story.
Uses Steam concurrent-player data to document Throne and Liberty's launch peak and its trajectory in the weeks following, comparing the pattern to Lost Ark and New World's own launch curves. A walk-through of public chart data as a pattern, not a verdict on the game.
A game with no up-front price reports its own audience to anyone who looks at the chart.
Photo: Throne and Liberty / Steam
Steam concurrent-player data recorded a peak, then the familiar curve
Throne and Liberty, the NCSoft-published MMORPG developed by NCSoft's internal team and distributed in Western markets by Amazon Games, launched globally on Steam on 26 September 2024. SteamDB's public concurrent-player record ↗ shows a peak of roughly 330,000 concurrent users within the first few days — a figure that placed it among the larger Western MMO launches of recent years.
The storefront most of the genre’s revenue now passes through, on the platform its largest earners were built for.
Photo: RDNE Stock project / Pexels
By the end of October 2024, that number had dropped to well below 50,000 concurrent players, and by late November it had settled into five-figure territory. The shape of the curve is not unusual. New World's Steam chart ↗ recorded a peak of approximately 913,000 concurrent users at its September 2021 launch and lost more than 90 percent of that figure within six weeks — a trajectory documented in Amazon Games' own subsequent decisions around the title's Aeternum relaunch. Lost Ark followed a similar pattern after its Western launch in February 2022, peaking above 1.3 million concurrent users before shedding the bulk of that population within a month.
Throne and Liberty's drop was proportionally comparable to both predecessors. The steepness of these early declines reflects the composition of a launch audience: a significant portion of players who arrive out of curiosity or goodwill and do not convert into long-term residents. The chart records that departure precisely.
What the chart does not record is revenue. Throne and Liberty operates on a free-to-play model with a cosmetic store, and Steam concurrent-player data carries no purchase or spending signal. NCSoft's quarterly filings — the company is listed on the Korea Exchange and reports publicly — are the appropriate source for any revenue reading, and no Western-market breakdown had been separately disclosed as of the end of 2024.
The launch fortnight is always the largest number a new MMO will have on Steam. Whether what remains is a stable community or a managed decline is a question the next twelve months of chart data will answer.
Photo: NCSOFT logo · Wikimedia Commons