Crimson Desert Launches to Divisive Reviews as Pearl Abyss Shares Crash 30%
Pearl Abyss's long-awaited open-world RPG landed with a Metacritic score of 78 and an IGN 6/10, triggering enormous community backlash — and a brutal overnight crash in the studio's stock price.
Crimson Desert launched today on PC, PS5, and Xbox Series X|S, and the result is the kind of release that manages to enrage everyone at once. Review embargoes lifted this morning to reveal a Metacritic score of 78 — not a disaster by any reasonable standard, but a gut punch for a game that had positioned itself as a potential Game of the Year contender. Individual scores ranged from a 4/10 to a perfect 10/10, which tells you more about the state of critical discourse than it does about the game itself, though it tells you plenty about both.
IGN's review-in-progress gave Crimson Desert a provisional 6/10, a number that landed like a grenade in the community. The reviewer had already logged over 110 hours without reaching the end, citing what he described as "painfully uninspired stealth sections" and puzzles that reward brute force over actual creative thinking. The high points were described as genuinely high — but the lows were frequent enough to keep a clean recommendation out of reach. PC Gamer called it "the most fascinating, frustratingly obtuse game ever," a line that captures exactly the kind of exhausted admiration the game seems to inspire. Windows Central was more charitable, calling it "too much in the best and worst ways" and ultimately "unforgettable" — though unforgettable and recommendable are not the same word.
The $70 price tag has sharpened every criticism. At $40 or $50, a 78 Metacritic score with wildly split critical opinion reads as an interesting risk. At $70, it reads as a problem. Communities on Reddit and social media have spent the day debating whether the critics got it right, whether the game is being unfairly punished for not being the game everyone imagined, and whether Pearl Abyss over-promised for years in a way that made disappointment structurally inevitable.
The financial fallout was immediate and severe. Pearl Abyss shares dropped roughly 30% overnight, falling from 65,500 KRW to approximately 47,800 KRW — around $31.84 USD — as investors processed the below-expectations reception. For a studio that spent years building hype around a single title as a flagship statement, a 78 is not the kind of number that inspires confidence in whatever comes next.
None of this necessarily means Crimson Desert is a bad game. The range of critical opinion suggests something more interesting than a straightforward failure — a game with genuine ambition and genuine problems living in uncomfortable proximity. But the launch day story is what it is: a community with enormous expectations, a studio under financial pressure, and a game that everyone agrees they have feelings about without agreeing on what those feelings actually are.