Crimson Desert Crosses 3 Million Sales in Just Five Days

Crimson Desert has sold 3 million copies worldwide within five days of its release.

Pearl Abyss launched the open-world action game on March 19, and it moved 2 million units in its very first day alone.

Pearl Abyss shared the milestone with a statement that read, "We are grateful to share Crimson Desert has sold through 3 million copies worldwide. To everyone who has stepped into Pywel and shared this journey with us, thank you. Your feedback continues to help shape the experience, and we will keep working to make the journey ahead even more enjoyable for our players."

Those are solid numbers by any standard, but the road to this milestone was not entirely smooth. The game launched on Steam with nearly 250,000 concurrent players, setting an all-time peak of 248,530. However, it landed with a "Mixed" user review rating on Valve's platform.

Players pointed to clunky controls and an unnecessarily complicated input system as the main problems. Performance issues also surfaced fairly early, with PS5 owners banding together to identify the cause of blurry visuals, a problem that was present on PC as well.

On the business side, things got rocky for Pearl Abyss. The company's stock dropped nearly 30% in what was widely seen as a reaction to critic review scores. A day after launch, it fell a further 9.78%, despite the strong sales figures.

According to the Korean business press, Pearl Abyss spent seven years developing Crimson Desert, with production costs reportedly reaching 200 billion won, which works out to approximately $133 million.

That is a significant investment, and the team clearly knows it. To their credit, they have been patching the game at a fast pace. A major update addressed the keyboard and mouse control complaints that players were most vocal about. It also improved control responsiveness and brought a long list of quality of life changes. Among those were the addition of a proper storage box, difficulty nerfs across several sections of the game, and more fast travel points added to the map.

Player responses began shifting quickly after those updates. Steam reviews moved from "Mixed" to "Mostly Positive", English language reviews have since climbed further to "Very Positive."

The Crimson Desert Metascore currently sits at 78, while the user score on the same platform stands at 8.1.

Steam concurrent player numbers have also held up reasonably well. At the time of writing, the 24-hour peak was sitting at over 205,000.