Pearl Abyss remade its PC hit Black Desert for mobile and crashed Korea's servers

South Korean video game company, maker of the open-world MMORPG Black Desert for PC and mobile.

A mobile remake of the open-world PC MMORPG could carry the franchise onto phones without losing what made it a hit.

Pearl Abyss launched Black Desert on PC in December 2014 and grew it to more than 8.5 million registered users across Asia, the US and Europe before commissioning a mobile remake.

Preregistrations passed 5 million. Shinhan Investment Corp. analyst Lee Moon-jong projected the game could rank first or second by domestic gross sales initially, with daily average sales of ₩2 billion for the first month and ₩1 billion for Q2 2018. On launch day, 28 February 2018, registration issues delayed the official release by around an hour.

Server errors after going live forced Pearl Abyss to temporarily shut the game down to fix them; by Wednesday afternoon users were still unable to log in. A console version for Xbox was planned for H1 2018 targeting North America and Europe.

Remaking a proven PC MMORPG for mobile recycles an established world and audience instead of betting on a new IP.

Five million preregistrations validated demand before a single won of launch revenue.

The launch crash shows the cost of scaling a game famous for seamless open-world play onto phones.

A parallel Xbox push targeted Western console players while the Korean mobile launch ran.

Preregistration demand is a stress test in disguise: 5 million sign-ups will find every flaw your server capacity planning left in the launch day script.

As of launch day the servers were being stabilised, and the Xbox console version was slated for the first half of 2018.