Crimson Desert Sells 3 Million in Just 5 Days

Crimson Desert has sold an impressive 3 million copies in just five days.

Pearl Abyss’ open world action game launched on March 19 and sold 2 million copies in a day. It’s now sold an additional 1 million copies in the subsequent four days.

“We are grateful to share Crimson Desert has sold through 3 million copies worldwide,” Pearl Abyss said. “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.”

Crimson Desert launched big on Steam with nearly 250,000 concurrent players, but was met with a ‘mixed’ user review rating on Valve’s platform. Much of the early criticism from players revolved around the controls, which some had called clunky and unnecessarily complicated. There were some performance complaints too. For example, PS5 owners joined forces to work out the cause of blurry visuals — an issue that was also on the PC version.

Meanwhile, Pearl Abyss saw its stock price plunge nearly 30% in what was seen as a reaction to review scores from critics. A day after launch, the company stock fell a further 9.78% — despite the big launch sales. According to the Korean business press, Pearl Abyss reportedly spent seven years making Crimson Desert, with development costs coming in at 200 billion won (approx. $133 million).

However, Crimson Desert Steam reviews are improving, moving up from ‘mixed’ to ‘mostly positive’ as Pearl Abyss releases game-changing updates. Indeed, today, English reviews are now up to ‘very positive.’ The Crimson Desert Metascore is 78, with the user score at 8.1.

Yesterday’s patch addressed keyboard and mouse control complaints, and improved control responsiveness with the promise of more to come. But it also made a long list of quality of life improvements, including the addition of an actual storage box, nerfs to a lot of the difficulty in the game, and more fast travel points. Pearl Abyss stock was down 2.51% today.

We’ve got plenty more on Crimson Desert, including player requests to make the dragon more accessible, a player discovery that shows the devs really have thought of everything, and our Crimson Desert review. If you’re jumping into Crimson Desert’s huge open world, we recommend you take a look at our guide to Things to Do First in Crimson Desert, plus Things Crimson Desert Doesn’t Tell You (we’ve got 28 and counting!). We’ve also got a guide to the Best Early Weapons we recommend picking up, the Best Skills to Get First (including a handy explainer of the skills system), and 34 Essential Tips and Tricks to help you succeed in Pywel.

Wesley is Director, News at IGN. Find him on Twitter at @wyp100. You can reach Wesley at wesley_yinpoole@ign.com or confidentially at wyp100@proton.me.