Alongside its product announcement event on Tuesday, Amazon also launched its long-awaited open-world massively multiplayer online (MMO) game, New World. Right out of the gate, the game climbed up the ladder of the hottest PC titles available right now.
New World launched to a peak of 700,000 concurrent players on Steam, becoming one of the platform’s biggest launches ever — reports CNBC.
Even after the launch hype died down a bit, the game had 450,000 concurrent players on Thursday, along with tens of thousands of players waiting in queues to join the action.
Amazon’s New World is an open-world game set in an alternate 17th century America where magic exists. Thousands of players occupy the fantasy realm, explore it, build virtual colonies, and experience civilization in, well, a new world.
The title was developed by Amazon Games Studio, the eCommerce giant’s video game development division. New World received rave reviews after a closed beta in July, during which it infamously bricked a number of Nvidia’s ‘cream of the crop’ RTX 3090 GPUs, and an open beta in early September.
If New World manages to keep this momentum going, it will prove that companies outside veteran game developers can break into this industry. It also might just be able to erase the humiliating failure that was Crucible, Amazon’s previous attempt at a big-budget, mainstream video game.
The game also has an inherently synergistic relationship with Twitch, the gaming-centric video streaming platform owned by Amazon.
New World is currently only available for PC. The game costs $49.99 CAD ($39.99 USD) for the base ‘Retail’ version on Steam.
