Amazon’s MMORPG had 913,000 players on Steam at launch – in 2024 they totally screwed it up

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Hardly any first-class MMORPG lost as many players on Steam in 2024 as Amazon’s New World, and 2024 was even supposed to be the flagship year of the MMORPG, which came to the PS5 and Xbox Series X consoles. But Amazon bought the console aisle at far too high a price. At release, New World had a peak of 913,027 players on Steam – in 2024 the game temporarily fell to 3,285 average players. MeinMMO author Schuhmann explains what mistakes Amazon made here.

These were Amazon’s big mistakes with New World: Amazon made 3 big mistakes with New World in 2024:

  • They haven’t developed the MMORPG any further throughout the year and haven’t revealed what they’re planning at all, instead just pointing to a “big update in the summer”. In May we had a PR nightmare when developers made fun of the fact that nothing was known about the summer update in a video. The developers apparently found this funny – the players felt like they were being made fun of.
  • When it was ultimately announced that the major update would include a port for Xbox and PlayStation, existing PC players were bitterly disappointed. They had almost a year to imagine what a great update awaited them, only to hear from Amazon: We are primarily interested in console gamers. The fact that PC players also received a revision of their MMORPG was lost in the general frustration.
  • Then they managed to announce the console update, the relaunch of New World, at the worst possible time: The launch of New World Aeternum was exactly after the release of the first AAA MMORPG for consoles in 5 years: Throne and Liberty. And the absurd thing: Amazon ruined the market for itself because they were the publisher for Throne and Liberty.

    • New World Aeternum: Well-staged gameplay trailer for launch

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    Stable player numbers on Steam will fall really low for the first time in 2024

    These are the effects of the decisions:

    New World’s player numbers were excellent when it was released on Steam in October 2021, but fell rapidly.

    But since February 2022, New World had established itself as a “stable” MMORPG on Steam:

  • The number of players went up to 67,750 average players during major updates (November 2022)
  • In weak phases, when nothing had happened for a long time, they sometimes sank to a low of 11,300 (June 2023)

    • But they had never fallen below this value until 2024.

    But without any innovation and without any prospect that things will get better, the number of players in New World 2024 plummeted to 3,285 – only a third of the previous low.

    The hoped-for renaissance at New World failed to materialize

    Was it worth the update then? No, unfortunately not – the New World: Aeternum relaunch was able to bring some players back to Steam, but the numbers only rose briefly to around 22,000 – far less than the peak in 2023.

    At least it was a success on the consoles? No, it doesn’t look like that. Looking at Google Trends, you can see that there was no upswing in interest and there was no real recovery in search relevance in October 2024.

    The attention of the gaming public was clearly on Throne and Liberty, on its own competition at Amazon.

    Players on PS4 and Xbox One wait 5 years for new MMORPG – Wars 2 from Amazon within 2 weeks

    What was the mistake? Since the release of Black Desert on PS4 (August 2019) and Xbox One (March 2019), players on consoles have been waiting for a full-fledged MMORPG. So New World should have been a real hit.

    However, Amazon has tripped itself up, because with the release of Throne and Liberty on October 1st, they filled exactly the gap that New World Aeternum actually wanted to fill on October 15th, just 2 weeks later.

    October 15th was the worst possible time to release an MMORPG on PS5 and Xbox Series X. Almost any other date in the last 5 years would have been better than October 15th.

    In the midst of the hype surrounding Throne and Liberty, Amazon blew its reboot of New World.

    This is what lies behind it: 2024 will go down in history as a terrible year for New World: mistakes were made that cannot be explained with common sense. Apparently they outsmarted themselves in the effort to create artificial hype:

  • But you can’t leave an MMORPG’s loyal player base in the dark for a year and fob them off with “Trust us, the summer update will be great.”
  • The longer you invoke a “summer update so massive that it’s worth the wait,” the higher your expectations will be, which will ultimately only be disappointed.
  • The idea of ​​releasing two console MMORPGs simultaneously within a two week window is truly inexplicable. That couldn’t have been the plan; something must have gone wrong in the coordination with the South Korean partner NetEase.

    • The fact that such blunders happen to a company like Amazon really raises doubts as to whether new projects like the Lord of the Rings MMORPG will do better. Let’s see when this is released – maybe parallel to the release of GTA 6, or something? There is a sign of life from the new MMORPG for Lord of the Rings from Amazon Games

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