Free MMO Throne and Liberty Drops $40 Early Access Fee at Full Launch, Review Scores Slide

Last week, it looked like Amazon’s Throne and Liberty would largely turn out to be a commercial success when it exited its early access period—a perk that would cost gamers at least $40. Although, as player counts spiked on Monday’s full release, so, too, did negative reviews, with the game sliding from a little over 60% positive reviews on Steam to 55% at the time of writing.

Mere hours after the game launched as free-to-play, concurrent player counts jumped massively from around 45,000 players to 326,377, according to SteamDB. That player count puts Throne and Liberty in fifth place, just behind Banana and PUBG: Battle Grounds in SteamDB’s 24h peak player count rankings. That said, as far as all-time peaks go, Throne and Liberty only comes in 33rd place, with everything from Starfield and Monster Hunter: World to Baldur’s Gate 3 surpassing it handily.

That said, Throne and Legacy launched on a Tuesday, and player counts for the new game have held fairly steady since launch. It wouldn’t be surprising to see player counts increase again over the coming weekend as gamers have more time and the word gets out about the launch. Baldur’s Gate 3 is an excellent example of just this type of increase in popularity. It launched on Steam on August 3, a Thursday, and player counts rose to 814,666 the following Sunday, with another spike to 875,343 players the following Sunday.

As for Throne and Liberty’s user reviews sliding by around 5% on Steam, most of those issues seem related to combat and gameplay, rather than the typical complaints of microtransactions and pay-to-win mechanics—although those are present, too.