Aion 2 Hit 397,905 Players on Steam, Then Its Reviews Fell to 58% Over a $14.99 Membership. Is It Pay-to-Win? Here's What Free Really Gets You, and Why I Think 'Mixed' Is Fair

Here's the number that made me stop scrolling: 397,905. That's how many people were inside Aion 2 on Steam at the same moment on Oct. 5, the first day of its global launch, and NC says the overall peak passed 400,000 once you add its own launcher. Now here's the other number: about 58%. That's roughly the share of Steam reviews that are positive today, down from 73% the day after launch.

Same game, same month, two very different moods. I haven't put hundreds of hours into Atreia, so I'm not going to pretend this is a hands-on review. What I did is read the launch coverage, the Steam figures outlets pulled from SteamDB and NC's own responses, then sort what's solid from what's just loud. I also built a receipt for the membership everyone is arguing about, because I think the math explains the mood better than the adjectives do.

The numbers behind the headline

Aion 2 isn't a newcomer, exactly. NC (the company formerly known as NCSoft) released it in South Korea and Taiwan in November 2025, and the global version is the one that arrived on Oct. 5 with servers in North America, South America, Europe and Japan. It's free to start, it runs on Steam and on NC's Purple platform, and it supports eight languages, according to The Elec.

Here's the Steam concurrency ladder, peaks rather than averages, with Purple left out. I added Throne and Liberty's record as a ruler, since it's NC's previous global MMO and both MoneyToday and BigGo use it for comparison.

• Sept. 17 playtest peak73,761
• Paid early access peak (began Sept. 30)171,530
• Oct. 18 peak, second weekend310,363
• Launch-day peak, Oct. 5397,905
• For scale: Throne and Liberty's Steam record336,300

Steam only. Bars are scaled to the 397,905 launch peak. Sources: MMOHuts, The Elec, MoneyToday, BigGo.

Two things jump out at me. The launch was about 2.3 times early access, which tells you the free-to-play switch mattered more than the Founders Pack crowd. And the slide from 397,905 to 310,363 is a drop of 87,542 players, yet it still leaves Aion 2 within about 26,000 of Throne and Liberty's record. BigGo notes that new games typically lose a lot of traffic in their second and third weeks. MetaRoad also logged 371,577 players on Saturday, Oct. 10, so the weekend crowd was real.

That's the part I find genuinely encouraging. Hundreds of thousands of people kept logging in after the novelty wore off. Whatever else is going on, the game itself isn't the problem the reviews are shouting about.

The review slide, in three snapshots

Steam's review score is a moving target, so treat each of these as a snapshot from a specific outlet, not a permanent grade. The filled green part of each bar is the positive share.

• 73%OCT. 6
  8,834 reviews, rated Mostly Positive, per The Elec.

• 60%OCT. 10
  22,903 reviews, Mixed, per MetaRoad. The sample had grown by more than 2.5 times in four days.

• 58%~OCT. 20-21
  Still Mixed, per MoneyToday and BigGo.

Notice what changed between the first and second snapshots: the number of reviews. A game with 8,834 reviews on day two is being rated by the people who rushed in. By day six it had 22,903, and the score fell as the sample grew. That's a pattern, not a verdict, but it's worth knowing.

Three weeks of Aion 2, in order

• Sept. 17A Steam playtest peaks at 73,761 concurrent players, per MMOHuts, with reviews mixed but not disastrous.
• Sept. 30Five days of paid early access begin for Founders Pack buyers. The Steam peak during early access is 171,530, and the game tops Steam's global sales chart, per The Elec.
• Oct. 3NC announces that the Founder's Pack title, skins, pet and wings will become account-wide after a later fix, according to a community guide that cites NC's notice.
• Oct. 5Global free-to-play launch. Steam peaks at 397,905, and NC says the total passes 400,000.
• Oct. 673% of 8,834 Steam reviews are positive. The first complaints about the membership are already the loudest ones.
• Oct. 10Reviews sit at 60% positive across 22,903, per MetaRoad.
• Oct. 16-17NC sanctions 7,933 and then 10,326 accounts for macro use and gold farming, 18,259 in two days by my addition.
• Oct. 18Steam peak of 310,363, roughly 78% of launch, in the game's second weekend.
• Oct. 20-21Reports put positive reviews at 58%, still Mixed, with the per-server membership named as the cause.

The membership receipt

Aion 2's own fans keep saying "it's free" and its critics keep saying "it's not really free," and both are describing the same system. So I wrote the system down as a receipt. Everything here comes from The Elec, MoneyToday and BigGo, and the last lines are my arithmetic.

The totals use the $14.99 price reported by MoneyToday and BigGo, with no discounts, and leave out Quina and the Deva Pass because I couldn't verify their prices.

The detail that turns a pricing complaint into a mood is the word "server." A membership covers the characters on the server where you activated it and nowhere else. Playing with friends on a different server, or trying the other faction, can mean paying again. A community guide that cites NC says the two factions live on different servers, so playing both takes two memberships. In Korea the same server-based model exists, which The Elec points out, and that matters. This isn't a bait-and-switch invented for the West. It's a model that clashed with what Western players expect from a subscription.

So is it pay-to-win?

I'll say up front that I don't love the phrase, because it means something different to every person who types it. Here's how I'd split it, using what's actually reported.

The Elec says NC doesn't sell the highest-tier gear directly for cash. But it also says the game offers a channel for turning real money into economic power: you buy Quina, exchange it for Kina that other players hold, and use that Kina on the marketplace, and the membership is what unlocks both steps. Critics, including a Softonic roundup, argue that gated trading plus a battle pass plus a cash shop make paying a real advantage in the economy and in gear.

My honest read is that it's not pay-to-win in the crudest sense, where a wallet beats a skilled player in combat. It's a paywall around the economy, and in an MMO the economy is half the game. If you never trade, you may barely feel it. If you do, you feel it constantly. I'd call that pay-to-participate, and I'd understand anyone who rounds it up to the other phrase.

Four kinds of players, four answers

The question that matters isn't "is Aion 2 good." It's "good for whom, and at what price." These tickets are my own rulings, built from the reported facts, and not a review of play I haven't done.

• The solo explorerTRY IT FREE

  Combat, graphics and flight exploration drew praise from overseas players, according to The Elec, and free players can quest and run dungeons. If you want a big, good-looking world and don't care about trading, the free tier is the point.

• The friends squadPLAN FIRST

  Agree on a server before anyone pays. The membership follows the server, and a free transfer exists, but the rules I read limit you to one per account and keep you within your own faction and region.

• The marketplace traderBUDGET FIRST

  You're the person the membership is built for, so do the receipt math above before you start. Multiply by every server you'd realistically use.

• The both-factions playerCOUNT FIRST

  If the factions are on separate servers, as the community guide says, you're looking at two memberships to do what feels like one thing. This is the player the per-server rule hits hardest.

The AI footnote

There's a second argument running through the reviews, and it deserves its own paragraph because it keeps getting tangled with the first. TheGamer reports that NC built its proprietary VARCO framework into development, which lets developers generate text, assets and audio with generative AI, and AION Strategies says NC's own Steam disclosure mentions Arcana card designs and some icons. MMOHuts and others say monetization, not AI, is what's driving the negative reviews.

I'd rather read a disclosure than find out from a datamine. If you want to see what a backlash over alleged, still unconfirmed AI art looks like, I wrote about it in my piece on Sega pulling Total War: Shogun 2 after two days. Aion 2 is a different case, and it's still worth noticing that the AI argument is the quieter one here.

What's confirmed and what isn't

• Confirmed by multiple outletsAion 2 hit 397,905 concurrent Steam players on Oct. 5, the membership costs $14.99 a month, and it applies per server.
• Confirmed by multiple outletsNC sanctioned 7,933 accounts on Oct. 16 and 10,326 on Oct. 17 for macro use and gold farming.
• Reported by one or two outletsThe 310,363 peak on Oct. 18 and the 58% review score come from MoneyToday and BigGo, which cite SteamDB and Steam. Review percentages change constantly.
• Reported by a community guideThe factions sit on separate servers, and Founder's Pack cosmetics will become account-wide. I couldn't read NC's original notices myself.
• UnsettledWhether NC will move the membership from per-server to per-account. I haven't seen NC say it will.
• UnsettledHow much of the review drop is about the membership versus the game itself. The reports lean toward monetization, but nobody has a clean split.

My take: Mixed is fair, and it isn't an insult

I'm going to start with the optimistic part, because I think it's the bigger story. A free-to-play MMO that still held 310,000 people at once two weeks after launching with 397,905 doesn't have a gameplay problem. People like being there. When The Elec lists what overseas players praised, it's combat, graphics, and flying, which is exactly what a sequel to Aion should get right.

Now the part that stays with me. The reviews aren't rating the world. They're rating the receipt. And I think "Mixed" is the correct word for a game where the first hour is generous and the economy is gated, because both of those things are true at the same time. NC deserves some credit for answering quickly: server transfers, the Founder's cosmetics change, thousands of bot and gold-farming sanctions. Production director Kim Nam-joon said in a stream that the team knew about problems from the Korean and Taiwan launches and chose to fix them before the global release. The reports describe fixes and conveniences refined in the Korean service, not changes to the membership, so the model they kept is a decision, not an accident.

Here's where I land. A server transfer is a workaround. It helps people reorganize around a price, and it doesn't change the price. If NC wants the reviews to catch up with the player count, the clearest message it could send is a membership that follows the account. I can't tell you whether that's coming, and nobody I read can either. What I can tell you is that 300,000 people are already inside, and a sign that says "free" works better when the fine print agrees with it.

If you've been following the other stories on this site about what people actually get for their money, it's the same itch, from the Xbox side in my math on the Xbox Cloud Gaming cap. And if you like stories where the mood and the Steam numbers disagree, the Witcher 3 remaster is another one.

Before you pay a cent

This is my own checklist, not NC's and not financial advice. It's what I'd do if I were starting today.

1. Play free long enough to learn which server your friends are on. The membership follows the server.
2. Ask yourself whether you'll use the marketplace at all. If you won't, work out what the membership would actually unlock for you.
3. Multiply $14.99 by every server you'd realistically play on, then decide.
4. Sort the Steam reviews by recent and read a page of them. The score hides how the complaints are split.
5. Check how your Steam and NC accounts are linked before you spend. A community guide says reaching the same character through Steam and Purple requires linked accounts.
6. Treat Quina, the Deva Pass and the membership as three separate purchases, and read what each one covers.

Quick answers