Crimson Desert Sells 2 Million Copies Within a Day of Launch

Image via Pearl Abyss

Crimson Desert has crossed 2 million copies sold worldwide, just one day after its official release on March 19.

Pearl Abyss launched its highly anticipated open-world action game across PC, PlayStation 5, and Xbox Series X and S, and the numbers came in fast.

The milestone was confirmed through an official post on the Crimson Desert X account, where the developers expressed their gratitude to the community.

"We are incredibly humbled to share that Crimson Desert has sold through 2 million copies worldwide," the statement read. "Thank you so much to our fans, community, and everyone who has joined us in Pywel. We will listen closely to the wide range of feedback shared by the community and work to make improvements quickly, doing our utmost to make the journey ahead even more enjoyable for our players."

At launch, the game on Steam reached an all-time peak of nearly 240,000 concurrent players, securing a spot among the top 3 most played games that day.

So the commercial performance is solid. The critical reception, however, is a different story. The game currently holds a "mixed" user review rating on Steam, with a good chunk of players pointing to the controls as a major pain point. Many have described them as clunky and unnecessarily complicated.

On top of that, performance issues have also crept up. PS5 players, for instance, have been comparing notes to figure out the cause of blurry visuals, a problem that reportedly affects the PC version as well.

These issues have had a real impact beyond the game itself. Pearl Abyss saw its stock price drop nearly 30% in what was widely interpreted as a reaction to early critic reviews. The following day brought another decline of 9.78%.

As per reports from the Korean business press, the company reportedly spent seven years developing Crimson Desert, with total development costs reaching approximately 200 billion won, which translates to around $133 million. That is a significant investment, and the pressure to hold onto the player base is very real right now.