Aion 2 Peaks Near 398,000 Players, Then Its Membership Model Takes the Heat

The launch

NCSoft’s Aion 2 launched globally, free, on Steam for PC and on the company’s own PURPLE platform on October 5, 2026, with servers in North America, South America, Europe and Asia (Japan). Paid Founder’s Pack advance access ran September 30 to October 4, and the free launch that followed was, by the numbers, a hit: SteamDB recorded an all-time Steam concurrent peak of 397,905 players on October 5 — Steam only, PURPLE players excluded — and NC said the overall cross-platform peak exceeded 400,000. The game was, in NC’s launch wording, created specifically for PC, with aerial combat and the Aion name’s long shadow behind it.

The membership

The backlash is about one product: the Special Quai Membership, $15.00 for 30 days. NC’s own product notice lists what it unlocks — access to remote storage, personal trading, the Wind Breeze Merchants, the Market, and the Quna Exchange Shop, plus a higher Odyle Energy cap and more reward-cube selections in Expedition, Transcendence and Sanctuary. The mechanism matters more than the price. Quna is the premium currency bought with real money; Kinah is earned in gameplay; members can exchange Quna for Kinah and spend Kinah on the player Market for gear and materials. NC’s July business-model notice said shop cosmetics are purely aesthetic and do not affect gear progression — the pay-to-win accusation rests on the exchange-and-trade route, not on direct power sales in the global shop. One mechanism deserves precision: membership raises the Odyle Energy cap from 560 to 840 and gives extra reward-cube selections, which means more rewarded dungeon loot per period — not, as some summaries put it, extra dungeon entries. Odyle Energy is spent to claim a dungeon’s loot, not to enter it.

The backlash in numbers

The Steam rating slid as the membership details spread. By October 9, SteamDB figures put positive reviews at 62.4% across 12,687 reviews, against an October 6 baseline near 69% — Notebookcheck independently reported about 65% across more than 14,000 reviews, with monetization dwarfing other complaints. Exact starting percentages vary by snapshot time and language filter, but the direction is consistent: from a strong launch into Mixed territory within four days. The per-server shape of membership is the complaint that keeps recurring: a player on multiple servers needs a separate membership for each, which turns a $15 subscription into a per-server bill.

What NC has and has not done

NC has not announced a change to the membership model, and no statement has been found that apologizes for or reverses the global monetization. What NC did do: its October 9 Global Producer Letter said it reads Steam reviews, community posts and Discord, cited the Founder’s Pack cosmetic adjustment (outfits usable on every character on the account, any server) as an example of reacting to feedback, and promised a first free server transfer, with transfers from October 14 — presented as the answer to the per-server membership complaint. Separately, NC sanctioned 7,933 accounts for botting and gold farming on October 16 and 10,326 more on October 17. The Korean and Taiwan launch apology from producer Kim Nam-joon, sometimes cited in this argument, predates the global launch (it followed the November 19, 2025 Korean/Taiwanese launch) and is not a response to the global backlash.

What it means for buyers

Membership is per server, not per account — a second server means a second $15, and a geared character on a server without membership cannot use the Market or the Quna Exchange. And the Quna-to-Kinah exchange is the pay-to-win argument in one mechanism: real money becomes tradeable wealth through the Market. Nothing in the global shop sells power directly, per NC’s own July notice — the accusation rests on the exchange route, and buyers should price that in before judging a geared account’s value.

Games in this story

AION 2