How ‘Crimson Desert’ beat the critics and became a global hit

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Washington Post

For years, South Korea’s biggest game studios made money in places most American players never look, inside the PC cafe or on the mobile charts. Korean games have been huge, but they’re also, in the global console conversation, mostly invisible.

That changed March 19 when Pearl Abyss released “Crimson Desert,” selling more than 5 million copies since launch, 2 million in the first day and another million by day five. A month in, it’s retaining more players on PC than most multiplayer games. It is easily the fastest-selling South Korean game ever.

South Korea Prime Minister Kim Min-seok posted on X to say the game had “captivated the hearts of users worldwide with a living game world created entirely from start to finish using their own technology.” The game, he said, had “opened a new chapter for K-content.”

A large part of the game’s continued success after that first explosion of sales can be attributed to the near-unprecedented amount of updates and changes made to the game within one month. Since release, “Crimson Desert” has added massive rideable mythical creatures like wolves, bears and boars, new items, new quests, and new ways to move, control and attack. The game received a tepid critical reception at launch, but nearly all of critics’ early complaints about pacing and a confusing interface have been scrubbed out. No wonder the game is retaining more players than the 2022 fantasy classic “Elden Ring” in the same period of time.

Most game studios take months if not years to make similar changes. “Starfield,” published by Microsoft’s Xbox, took three years to make its most recent updates. French publisher Ubisoft routinely takes months to push major updates to its Assassin’s Creed games while charging a substantial fee. Pearl Abyss has achieved more than most within a month, all without charging an additional penny.

Will Powers, the studio’s head of publishing, said the breakneck speed of updates was informed by the company’s experience updating “Black Desert,” Pearl Abyss’s massively multiplayer online game (a genre staple for South Korean gamers). It has shipped a major update almost every Wednesday since 2015. “Crimson Desert” began as a follow-up. Instead, the company eyed the global console market and pivoted the game to focus on a single-player narrative adventure while bringing a “live service” feel to the adventure.

“That is not normal in the industry. That is normal here,” Powers told The Washington Post in an interview.

The post-launch responsiveness has looked, from the outside, like a road map being executed in real time. It mostly wasn’t.

“There was no official communicated roadmap with set-in-stone dates,” the development team told The Post through a written statement, with answers confirmed by co-founder and chairman Kim Dae-il. In contrast to games like “Highguard” — a competitive shooter that promised much in advance but shut down within 45 days — Pearl Abyss has rearranged its plans according to what players have asked for since launch.

“Everything, patch-wise, content-wise, has been iterated in real time based on feedback, based on response,” Powers said. “If you bake in a road map, you’re presuming. We are not baking in presumptions around what the players want,” he added.

That practice traces back to “Black Desert” and its customers who never left.

“There is no ‘Black Desert’ if there are no players, and there is no ‘Crimson Desert’ without ‘Black Desert,’” Powers said. “The DNA of the company is inherent in listening to players.”

The audience has been spoiled. Complaints in forum threads and articles are made outdated within a week. Too little inventory space for stuff you pick up? Pearl Abyss conjured up wardrobe closets, refrigerators and new ways to reformat the game’s “camp” to act as a hub for equipment. Does Kliff, the player protagonist, get too tired too quickly? Give them a few days, and the “stamina meter” is exponentially increased.

Players even discovered a hack to make Kliff zip across the skies with a special stab move in the air, which the team did not intend. Rather than removing the ability, Pearl Abyss made it a little less viable but gave it a fancy animation, letting Kliff twirl through the air gracefully.

“We’re not onerous about, if an idea didn’t come from us, then it can’t be in the game,” Powers said. “I think that’s something that [other companies are] too ego-driven a lot of the time to be able to accept other people’s ideas. It’s almost Silicon Valley-esque. A good idea can come from anywhere.”

Pearl Abyss is a sizable studio in South Korea, but it has a small footprint on the global scale. Kim told The Post in 2022 that he hoped Pearl Abyss could do for games what “Squid Game” and Bong Joon Ho’s “Parasite” had done for Korean television and film. It’s been an uphill battle in a games industry that’s become more volatile and risky over the years.

While most game studios have platoons of marketing teams across the world, Powers was part of a five-person squad monitoring online feedback. But he said that means less red tape.

“We are an indie publisher with a triple-A quality game,” Powers said. “We can actually have fun and we can do things. We’re more adaptable, we are more malleable. We can pivot faster, versus the AAAs of the world that are restricted by their brand bibles.”

The game took seven and a half years to make, on top of three years to create the company’s internal toolkit, the BlackSpace game engine.

With this much work, is the studio being overworked? South Korea is famous for its brutal work culture. Powers said work hours are normal because the studio is designed for making massive changes in short bursts. If anything, he said, the studio has been preparing itself for a decade to put on what’s essentially a performance that responds to its audience, like a live improv show.

“We needed to ‘yes and’ ourselves,” he said.

The creative engine driving all this, Powers said, is co-founder Kim, who serves as the game’s executive producer and director (and rarely gives interviews).

“He’s very much not the business person. He’s the creative mind behind all the ideas,” he said. “He still is incredibly integrated and active in developing the creative and tech behind it. He works in the weeds every day to make things happen.”

It was Kim, Powers said, who insisted that the game’s Korean cultural undertones be made overt, including its taekwondo-inspired martial arts moves, costuming, food and architecture, all fused into a bright Western fantasy frame.

South Korea’s entertainment industry has spent decades building up its soft power as a global cultural force. With “Crimson Desert,” Pearl Abyss has earned a seat at the table in the games industry as a major player worth watching. For now, players can expect more free updates and expansions as the company slowly shifts toward creating new content and adventures.

“This is just us doing what we do,” Powers said.