Amazon’s New World is enjoying a mammoth launch

Amazon Games looks as though it has its first hit on its hands, with New World enjoying a monster launch today.

Following in the footsteps of an open beta which reportedly attracted over one million players in July, the MMO is racking up some impressive Steam numbers on its release day.

According to SteamDB, New World has attracted as many as 707,230 concurrent players today.

Only four titles have ever attracted more concurrent players: PUBG Battlegrounds (3,257,248), Counter-Strike: Global Offensive (1,308,963), Dota 2 (1,295,114) and Cyberpunk 2077 (1,054,388).

New World was originally scheduled to launch last May before being delayed on four separate occasions.

The MMO “pits players against the haunted wilderness of Aeternum, a mysterious supernatural island in the twilight of the Age of Exploration”.

The game’s start will be encouraging for Amazon, which has struggled to penetrate the competitive video games market.

Development of the company’s team-based shooter Crucible officially ceased in October 2020, just five months after the game’s launch, following its struggle to attract a significant player base.

More recently Amazon cancelled a Lord of the Rings MMO, reportedly because of a dispute with Tencent, the parent company of the title’s co-developer Athlon Games.

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Team-based FPS had struggled to attract players

“When big players want to get into the gaming space, they have to accept it takes a certain amount of time, that for a long time things can be very unpredictable,” Amazon Games’ vice president Christoph Hartmann told GamesIndustry.biz in an interview published last week.

“You can do all the market research you want, but you’re not going to know whether you have a good game until you put it in someone’s hands. Sometimes you don’t even know what you’ve got until it hits the marketplace.

“So many people get out too early because they get nervous about it. Because the toolset they have to judge success, which is driven by numbers, is just not there,” the founder of Take-Two‘s 2K Games label continued.

“You get it once you go to scale, but you go to scale when the game is almost done. Until then, you live in a world of doubts or dreams. That’s the struggle for any big company that wants to get into games.”