AION 2 Free-Launch Day Two: 400,000 Concurrency and a Commercial Report Card Topping Three Charts#

Wubian | October 7, 2026

Hi everyone, Wubian here. This is the editorial team’s third consecutive day on AION 2: on October 5, launch day, Zhanlan Yingren wrote the global free-launch preview from a veteran player’s perspective; on October 6 I wrote the day-one recap, taking apart the three definitions of the active-player numbers. Today’s piece is the third in the same series — not one word will be repeated about the launch process or the day-one activity curves; it answers only the question the first two pieces never took head-on: does the free-to-play transition actually hold up commercially?

NC’s official release on October 6 was less a news item than a business-model validation report handed to the entire industry: right after the global servers opened, the game accumulated more than 400,000 concurrent players on Steam (CCU, including NC’s own PURPLE platform), simultaneously claimed first place on Steam’s Top Sellers, Popular New Releases, and Trending Free charts, and topped the Top Sellers chart in 15 regions.

My view up front: the most analytically valuable part of this battle report is not the 400,000 — it is that “No. 1 on Top Sellers” and “No. 1 on Trending Free” hold at the same time. The scenario a free-to-play MMORPG fears most is the paying base collapsing as zero-barrier players flood in, and this three-chart structure is precisely a direct rebuttal of that worry.

While we’re at it, here’s the three-day division of labor, so new readers can find their place:

Each piece covers its own stretch; this one doesn’t compete with the first two. Six sections follow.

1. No. 1 on Three Charts at Once: A Health Check on Free-to-Play Revenue#

First, what each of the three charts actually measures — they are not the same heat counted three times, but readings from three different cross-sections of the revenue structure:

Assembled, the three cross-sections paint this picture: new players are pouring in (No. 1 free chart), the game’s heat as a new release is still high (No. 1 new releases), and paying players’ wallets have not left because of the free switch (No. 1 on the revenue-ranked Top Sellers). The third is the most crucial — since Early Access opened on September 30, AION 2 has held No. 1 on Steam’s global Top Sellers and topped the Top Sellers charts in 15 regions including the US, Canada, the UK, France, Germany, Japan, Australia, and Brazil (the official list is not exhaustive).

One timing detail deserves a separate note: Founder’s Pack sales ended when Early Access closed on October 5 — meaning that after the free launch, the revenue counted by the Top Sellers chart had switched entirely to microtransactions such as the monthly membership, paid currency, and passes. In other words, the “Top Sellers No. 1” title refers to two completely different revenue structures before and after launch — the first version rested on one-time purchases, the latter on long-term payment items. The latter reaching No. 1 the very day after launch shows the microtransaction engine spun up as fast as the buy-in packs exited — the link most prone to breaking in a free-to-play transition.

The pre-launch Steam wishlist count of over 1.3 million (NC’s official figure) is the traffic base beneath all three charts: wishlist conversion, livestream exposure, and the free gate opening — three intakes at once — produced this chart structure the next day. The product itself carries this conversion too — per official marketing, flight is the core experience, the world is 36 times the size of the original AION, with diving plus PvE and PvP aerial combat; the global servers cover North America, South America, Europe, and Japan, with UI and subtitles in 8 languages including English, Japanese, Korean, French, German, and Spanish. The 1.3 million wishlists correspond to exactly this product narrative; opening the free gate poured that stock into the funnel in one go.

Laying out the chart milestones of launch week in sequence makes the continuity of “Top Sellers No. 1” across two revenue structures visible:

From paid buy-in to pure microtransactions, the Top Sellers No. 1 crown held continuously for a week without a gap — for a free-to-play transition, “revenue-structure switch without a gap” is closer to the definition of “validated” than any single-day peak.

One frequently misread point in this chart structure deserves correcting on the reader’s behalf: topping three charts at once does not mean “three times as good.” The free chart and the new-releases chart measure attention; only the Top Sellers chart measures money. A high position on the attention charts is a leading indicator for Top Sellers, not a parallel achievement. What is genuinely hard to assemble is exactly this combination — attention without payment never climbs the Top Sellers; payment without acquisition cannot hold the free and new-release charts. A three-chart crown is closer to the definition of a “healthy opening” than any single-chart title — that is why I call this battle report a “health check” rather than a “victory bulletin.”

2. After 400,000, Watch the Water Level: Steady-State Concurrency Is the Revenue Base#

Definitions first. Around the “400,000” there are two numbers that must be written down side by side:

The two metrics cannot be mixed, nor converted into each other. Compared with the Early Access period, Steam’s October 1 peak was 171,530, rising to 397,905 after the official launch — an increase of 226,375 players, roughly 2.3 times — the amplification effect of the free conversion itself; the previous recap computed the daily curves in detail, so here I take only the conclusion.

What I really want to stress today is the other set of numbers that comes after the spike: the water level. A free-to-play MMORPG’s revenue roughly factors into “steady-state concurrency x paid conversion rate x payment depth”; the peak only decides where the story starts, while the steady state decides the revenue floor. Two independent snapshots from launch day two (October 6):

The two snapshots come from different moments; they cannot be joined into a curve, and neither is an official promise of “steady state” — but together they show one thing: on day two, the online base did not fall off a cliff, and still stood at the 300,000 level. For a free-to-play game, that water level is the intake cross-section of the paid-conversion funnel. The first-hour 400,000 was a communications event; still standing at the 300,000 level the next day is the revenue base — the second piece of the “business-model validation” puzzle: it doesn’t just spike high, it holds.

A bucket of cold water, though: snapshots are single-point data, and as launch fervor fades, a decline is inevitable — where the water level finds its floor is the genuinely unresolved part of this report card. The week-two retention of these 400,000 users will provide the first real denominator for the free-to-play revenue formula.

A few rules of reading discipline for anyone quoting these numbers in the coming days:

• Don’t connect the dots. 333,199 and ~280,000 come from different moments and channels; each can only be cited on its own, not strung into a “fell from 330,000 to 280,000” narrative — with different sampling moments, such a line is making up a story.
• Don’t average. Two snapshots cannot support any mean; claims like “an average of about 300,000 concurrent over the first two days” have no statistical basis.
• Don’t extrapolate revenue. Steady-state concurrency multiplied by any hypothetical conversion rate is fiction — NC has disclosed no revenue figure for the global servers; Section 4 will stress this once more.
• Don’t cross-compare platforms. The KR/TW servers’ daily actives are a PC-plus-mobile figure, while the global servers’ concurrency is PC only — the two metrics have different definitions, and dividing one by the other is meaningless — in Section 4’s timeline table, each set is labeled with its metric; please cite them separately.

3. Two Fault Lines in the Sentiment Split: Payment Depth and AI-Assisted Content#

The review section’s trajectory is as informative as the charts. On launch day, Steam reviews climbed from “Mixed” to “Mostly Positive,” with intraday snapshots recording positive rates roughly in the 67%-78% band:

One data-discipline note first: the three snapshots differ in scope, sampling time, and language mix — they are not three points on one curve and cannot be joined. Only two solid conclusions follow: the positive rate was in a climbing channel on launch day, and the rating lifted from “Mixed” into “Mostly Positive” territory. Divergence between tracking channels for the same day is normal, and I advise nobody to cite a single value.

One layered pattern is also worth recording: multiple reports agree that players with longer playtime gave noticeably higher positive rates. In other words, negative reviews skew toward players who just walked in — they hit queues, downloads, and the paywall as a first impression — while players inside the core loop judge more generously. For a free-to-play game this split is double-edged: it shows the product’s core retains people, and it shows the widest layer of the funnel (brand-new free players) is precisely the layer most easily turned away by payment optics.

The structure of the split deserves more attention. The negative section’s main firepower targets payment depth, not the game itself:

The most widely circulated line in the reviews: “It calls itself free-to-play (F2P), but it feels like free-to-spend (F2SP).” The quip lands precisely on a semantic crack in free-to-play — a free threshold and free total spending are two different things. But the other half of the facts must also be recorded honestly: the positive rate climbed roughly ten percentage points within 24 hours, showing a substantial share of the newly admitted players gave positive reviews — sentiment is not a one-way slide.

The other fault line is AI-assisted content. NC’s official disclosure on the Steam page states that some in-game assets were created with AI tools — Arcana card designs and some icons used AI generation; separate media reporting says NC’s in-house VARCO AI was used for this title’s text, voice, quality assurance, and some visual assets — two sources, same direction. By review-section volume, the AI controversy is clearly secondary to the payment controversy so far, and has not become the main driver of negative reviews.

One more timeline to set the sentiment climb against: per community and media compilation, NC added 4 servers during Early Access due to login queues (Europe: Meslamtaeda for Elyos, Beritra for Asmodians; NA West: Nezekan and Zikel), and ran one roughly 90-minute emergency maintenance to fix congestion in starter-zone quest interactions — no separate official announcement was issued for these moves. The capacity additions, the maintenance, and the rising positive rate all fall within the same 24-hour window, and can be read against each other on the timeline; but which step contributed how many percentage points of sentiment — no public attribution analysis exists, and I won’t draw conclusions on the data’s behalf.

4. The KR/TW Servers’ Ten-and-a-Half-Month Practice Exam: What Happened After 46 Days to 100 Billion Won#

The reason the global report card dared to go straight to free-to-play is the data banked by the KR/TW servers’ roughly ten and a half months of head-start operation. The timeline first:

A data correction is required here: some Chinese reports summarized the KR/TW results as “10 billion won in 100 days,” which conflicts with NC’s official press release — the official figure is over 100 billion won cumulative by day 46 (through January 3, 2026), and this piece follows the official figure. As for the KR/TW lead over the global servers: from November 19, 2025 to the global launch on October 5, that is about ten and a half months — not 100 days.

This timeline’s meaning for validating the “free-to-play business model” splits into three layers. First, the two markets’ division of validation labor as a table:

• Payment depth: validated. 100 billion won in 46 days and over 1 million characters buying membership show that this “de-gacha + membership” moderate-payment model can carry revenue — it is not a topline built on probability items. That is NC’s confidence in going straight to free-to-play globally.
• The decay slope is validated too. Q1’s 136.8 billion to Q2’s 71.9 billion is a QoQ halving, officially called “entering a stable period”; after July’s major update, all three indicators recovered. In operations language: this model’s revenue curve is highly sensitive to content-update cadence — moderate payments lower per-user depth, so patch cadence must backfill the decay curve. The global servers will face the same curve; KR/TW effectively submitted the practice exam early.
• Payment structure is the hidden variable. About 90% of KR/TW payments went through NC’s own PURPLE payment system, bypassing app-store cuts (Korean media relay). Owning the payment channel means consumption data stays in-house — which incidentally explains why PURPLE players never appear in any SteamDB statistics. And precisely because of this, NC has still not disclosed any global revenue figure; every revenue anchor cited in this piece comes from KR/TW historical data, and anyone’s “global revenue projection” at this moment has no factual basis.

5. The De-Gacha Ledger: Membership, Pass, Cosmetics, and a Two-Way Exchange#

One page of the business-model blueprint deserves its own dissection. NC’s choices in AION 2 line up almost point for point against traditional Korean MMO pathologies:

NC stated the strategic intent itself: on the Q3 2025 earnings call, it said AION 2’s monetization would be more lenient than Throne and Liberty’s, in order to widen the user base. That earnings-call quote is the key to the whole report card — moderate monetization is an open-handed trade: concede per-user payment depth in exchange for a bigger user base, then recover revenue through conversion and long-term retention.

The two-way Exchange is the ledger’s most noteworthy cell. Kinah and Quna converting in both directions means an officially priced exchange channel now exists between paying and non-paying players: the cash flowing into cosmetics can be converted through the Exchange into in-game liquidity, and pure free-to-play players can earn premium currency through in-game output. For the cosmetics model, this channel does three things at once — gives cosmetic spending indirect in-game value, leaves non-paying players a participation path that costs nothing, and absorbs the demand for private cash trading into official channels. By contrast, traditional Korean MMO probability items are a pure cash funnel, where free players barely qualify to participate in exchange. The community ecosystems the two designs produce are, in the long run, two different species.

Reread the launch data through this logic and the causal chain aligns: free-to-play amplified the Early Access peak by 2.3x (171,530 to 397,905) — the direct yield of “widening the user base” — and the Top Sellers chart staying No. 1 after the free switch shows the paying base did not hemorrhage while depth was conceded. Both facts holding together is what makes this “moderate monetization for a bigger base” model actually stand.

One more revenue-property change to record at the bottom of the ledger: Founder’s Packs are one-time revenue — collected once, then done; monthly memberships and passes are recurring revenue — they compound as long as they renew. For the revenue curve, the implication is that the free-to-play version’s revenue floor is set by renewal rates, not by new purchases — the KR/TW servers still posted 71.9 billion won in a single quarter in Q2, with membership and pass renewals as the base layer (officials have not split the proportions; here we discuss structure, not share). How many future renewal accounts hide inside the global servers’ 400,000 day-two concurrency is the most valuable — and hardest to price right now — column of this report card.

But the negative section’s controversies also mark the boundary of this route: “moderate” is relative to probability items. When the Special Quai membership folds some Market and Exchange functions into paid perks, player perception becomes “convenience got paywalled.” De-gachafication resolved the old grievance of paying for stats; paid privileges touching trading functions created the new grievance of payment affecting the economy — that is the deeper tension behind Section 3’s table, and the finest balance this model must strike.

One physical premise worth noting too: the global servers run on Azure infrastructure under NC’s partnership with Microsoft, with a launch-scale stress test on September 17-18. Smoothly carrying 400,000 concurrent is the infrastructure floor beneath the “big base” strategy.

6. October 14, Three Lines Converge: Sampling Points for the Next Report Card#

Three near-term milestones land on the same day, plus two long-running observations — together they form the next page of this report card:

One set of details needs a sourcing label: per community and media compilation, NC added 4 servers during Early Access due to login queues (Europe: Meslamtaeda for Elyos, Beritra for Asmodians; NA West: Nezekan and Zikel), and ran one roughly 90-minute emergency maintenance to fix starter-zone quest congestion — no separate official announcements; details follow the community compilation. Also, per the official behind-the-scenes documentary released on YouTube that day and third-party snapshots, the client is roughly 82GB — every new player had to fit 80-plus GB onto their drive on free-gate day, and that download barrier’s real attrition on the acquisition funnel is a hidden cost of free-to-play that gets little discussion.

Merging the milestones above with this piece’s validation criteria into one acceptance checklist — future tracking just checks the boxes:

Closing: The Column Still Missing from the Report Card#

After three straight days on AION 2’s opening, my judgment is: this day-two battle report proves two things about the free-to-play transition — zero barriers really can expand the user base to more than twice the paid period’s size, and the de-gachafied payment model kept the Top Sellers chart while the base grew. For the free-to-play MMORPG genre, the sample of “user base and paying base online at the same time” finally has its first complete dataset.

But the report card still has wide blank columns: the global servers’ revenue figures are undisclosed, PURPLE’s true scale hides outside third-party statistics, and the next stop after the positive rate climbed to around 78% is unknown. I have long watched online-game economies, and what concerns me most is whether that KR/TW Q2 curve of roughly -47% QoQ repeats on the global servers — a moderate-monetization model’s vitality lives ultimately not in the launch peak, but in the content-update cadence and week-two retention. Reading back this report card’s structure: the chart structure answered “did the paying base collapse,” the water-level snapshots answered “how wide is the funnel,” the KR/TW timeline answered “does the payment model work” — what remains unanswered, only time can grade. After the three lines converge on October 14, we keep watching the data.

— Wubian, NTGame Editorial Team