Crimson Desert is clawing its way back from its fairly controversial launch, proving itself an unambiguous critical and commercial success after two weeks of meaningful updates and improvements.
Pearl Abyss dropped its new open-world RPG on March 19 to largely positive critical reviews but "Mixed" user reviews on Steam, with widespread criticism going toward its story and controls. There were also some early controversies around most of its mounts not being permanent, but Pearl Abyss quickly addressed both of those issues by adding five new permanent mounts and removing and apologizing for the AI art thing. Even more crucially, it's been continuously working in updates to improve the game's clunky controls, which have been the community's biggest pain point since launch.
The developer's hard work appears to be paying off, at least if you're going off publicly available Steam data. Just looking at user reviews, Crimson Desert has gone all the way from its mixed rating at launch to "Very Positive," with 85% of its nearly 40,000 reviews being positive. More importantly to Pearl Abyss, Crimson Desert is also the second best-selling game on Steam behind Counter-Strike 2 and the single best-selling new game, according to Steam's official ranking. That's not terribly surprising considering nothing nearly as high-profile as Crimson Desert has launched since its release, but this Steam data is yet another metric proving Pearl Abyss has a hit on its hands – in case a reported $200 million in sales and four million copies sold wasn't enough.
Of course, the only real affirmation anyone needs comes from Palworld publishing lead John "Bucky" Buckley, who handed Crimson Desert his coveted game of the month award for March 2026 and said he hasn't felt the same sense of wonder playing a game since The Elder Scrolls: Oblivion.
