Popular Korean MMO Lost Ark will not be coming to Europe and North America in 2020 as the developer Smilegate don't have any plans for western expansion in the near future.

Lost Ark is a fairly new MMO from the Korean developer Smilegate. The game gained huge popularity upon its release but was only available in South Korea and has expanded to Russia recently. Still, the game lacks Europe and North America release, where a huge chunk of players have been playing the game using various methods, which include purchasing Korean accounts and phone numbers.

Last year, Smilegate said that Lost Ark will someday arrive to EU and NA but since then, nothing has been said about the expansion and by the looks of it, Lost Ark will not have a Western release anytime soon. Korean website The Bell reports that Smilegate do not have any plans for EU and NA release at the moment and are focused on the existing versions and the upcoming Japanese release.

Apparently, the localisation is the biggest issue for the developer as it takes a lot of time to translate all subtitles and record new, English voices. On top of that, the devs are pretty busy with the Japanese version, which basically means that you can forget about Lost Ark EU/NA servers in 2020.

Now, this will come as a disappointment to many MMO fans who wait for the English version of Lost Ark but according to reports, Lost Ark is losing popularity in Korea pretty fast due to its poor endgame and monetisation model, which is described by players as "pay2progress".

All in all, by the time Lost Ark finally releases in the West, players will probably have much better options available in Diablo 4 and Path of Exile 2.