NCSOFT Corp’s Blade & Soul has proven that there is still a market for MMO games in the West, provided of course that they do not cost anything. In just one week, the game’s player base has surged to over 1 million users.

Originally released in South Korea in 2012, Blade & Soul arrived in the West for the first time last week, officially launching on January 19. The action MMO uses a free-to-play model that allows players to buy cosmetic items, additional character slots, bag space unlocks and so on, either by paying real money for premium currency called NCoins or by earning a special type of in-game currency called Hongmoon Coins.

While a player count of over 1 million is certainly impressive for an MMO that is not called World of Warcraft, it is unclear what percentage of that player base is actually made up of paying customers and what percentage is simply curious MMO fans trying out a new free game.

Aside from player numbers, a good barometer for the success of a new game is its popularity on livestreaming sites like Twitch, and by that measure Blade & Soul seems to be going strong.

For the last week, the game has consistently remained in the top 20 most watched games on Twitch, and it has occasionally even broken the top 10, a tier normally occupied by juggernauts like League of Legends, Hearthstone: Heroes of Warcraft, and Minecraft.

In fact, at this moment Blade & Soul is ahead of both Minecraft and World of Warcraft in terms of concurrent viewers on Twitch.

The game has received some criticisms for its cluttered interface, frequent server outages, and “jiggle physics” (which is an oxymoron, since boobs in Blade & Soul do not seem to obey any known laws of physics), but it has also been praised for its high-energy gameplay and colorful world.

You can read our first impressions of the game here, and if you want to try it out for yourself, you can visit bladeandsoul.com.

Screenshots by Eric David SiliconANGLE