Amazon’s New World MMO Has Already Lost Around Half of Its Playerbase since Launch

[Tsing]

Image: Amazon



Amazon’s New World launched to great success in September, but interest in the open-world MMO appears to be fading fast. As indicated by numbers spotted by Forbes’ Paul Tassi, New World has gone from over 900,000 players at the beginning of the month to 508,000 last week, a substantial and disappointing decrease. That’s an average of 135,000 players jumping ship every week.



New World’s player count throughout the month:



10-3: 913,000 players10-10: 726,000 players10-16: 608,000 players10-23: 508,000 players



From Tassi:



For most games, a decline like this wouldn’t be a problem, but for an MMO where the entire purpose is to sustain a playerbase over a long period of time, dropping to almost a third of your peak after your first month is somewhat alarming, and shows that something has to be done about player retention.



Tediousness and the...

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[GunShot]

Fake news and a nothing burger!

Do people believe that a new game launch impulse numbers will stay the same for days, weeks, or forever?!

F2P games e.g. CS: GO, Dota, etc. have lost millions of players (FREE), so it's expected for New World's in-game numbers would balance out and a paid 500k concurrent gamers are nothing to look down on to tell its future.

 

[Denpepe]

Sounds about right for an MMO, everyone is curious and has a look and players drop fast after finding out it's not for them, happens to all MMO's afaik

 

[Riccochet]

It's a very grindy game. Everything is a grind. And you do the same quests over and over, which gets old fast. It also makes it difficult to quest with someone else. The faction quests are random, and there just aren't a lot of area quests. It's like you blow through the area quests really quickly, and then have to grind the same faction quests over and over and over and over.

 

[David_Schroth]

Or is it that every time that they lose a player it means a 3090 died in the line of duty?

 

[Brian_B]

Every MMO since 2005 gets compared to WoW.

WoW had a rocky release as well. But the devs responded quickly, fixed bugs, threw out new content at a decent clip, and it grew fairly steadily from release. You could see some cyclical growth/regression right before/after major releases, but up until just a few years ago, the trend was generally upward.

What that means for New World: not much. It's still too soon to tell if this is just some of the new car smell wearing off, or if it's just a little dip.

Not all MMOs need to have steady, let alone meteoric positive growth to do well - it's just WoW is the inevitable comparison. SWTOR had a really huge release, then nosedived down to something stable, and is still kicking. And there's the anomaly that is FFXIV, it should have died, and it was resurrected from beyond and today is among the top MMOs some 10 years later. So it's not like this is the death knell tolling for New World - it really just depends on what Amazon does in response.

Personally, I don't think New World is a good MMO, and I'm primarily an MMO player. I think to it will continue to drift down and finally plateau around some stable population of people who dig it (and I'm sure there are some out there -- this really should be marketed in the multiplayer Survival genre, like ARK and Conan Exiles)-- provided we don't see major changes and content additions. The only reason I think it was as large as it was at the onset is that it had a lot of initial buzz and we haven't had a major western MMO release in a really long time and there is some pent up demand.

MMOs require a steady hand with clear vision and a compassionate, intelligent developer. I don't think Amazon is either -- their treatment of their internal game releases to date makes me think they will cut bait and run, but I think it's almost as likely that they knee jerk and try to overcompensate with some radical overhauls that kill what those people that do like the game enjoy. It's not like New World's release plan has been the most stable, the game has been radically changed several times in the development process; each time getting bent around whatever the vocal minority of the time scream loudest about ... and in the end it's left them with a gutless husk of a project that just ends up chasing buzzwords and doesn't really have any soul.

 

[Grimlakin]

What would serve the market well is an assassins creed style MMO. If you think about the game it already has many of the functional aspects of an MMORPG.

Just tack on some MMO. Instanced spaces for specific missions, the rest is open world. 'Assassinate 20 guards of boka de peppers butthole city in the year 1823'. You go and kill some guards to progress unlocking the mission to assasinate boka de peppers butthole. Everyone is on the same progression. Raids could be where you assign tasks to members to take out specific areas if they complete it the final fight that has all of you working in a huge melee takes place. They have already broached supernatural challenges so you can have that in there too. (Origins did big time so did Odyssey. And hell even Valhalla) That game world could become a fun MMO. You could have guild meetings in different times with everyone playing different ancestors to go to the meeting and do some fun guild stuff. Different specializations of Assassins as well.

That's just me but I think it would be a compelling setting with a blend of modern and ancient and supernatural thrown in with the iziz or whatever the hell the progenitor aliens are called.

Just another fantasy throwback isn't going to take hold any more I don't think. and doing a futuristic MMO is going to be hard to do well. "What do you mean my sniper rifle only has a range of 100 meters that's BS.". I mean yea you can conceptualize it for a TTRPG setting but executing on that is going to be a pain in the butt.

Some people want a vampires bloodlines style MMO. But I don't know if the market can handle that amount of gore and sexy in a game today especially MMO style.

Secret worlds tried to do it and I don't even know wtf happened to that MMO. Wait lets see what google says. Hummm says it's a Free to play MMO now. maybe I'll take a look at it...

anyway MMO's are hard to make because investors in MMO's expect to make money like blizzard and activision.

If World of warcraft released today it would not have the same impact as it did. It would be an ok game but it's missing too much to even be considered a modern MMO.

 

[Zarathustra]

Or is it that every time that they lose a player it means a 3090 died in the line of duty?

I'm pretty sure fears about this have had at least a small impact on player counts.

I have seen many people question if they should try the game, for fear of destroying their GPU's.

Mostly unfair to the game, as it is a hardware issue that only affects a small number of people, but still.

Goes to show how negative press, even if it is not 100% accurate can have an impact.

 

[Denpepe]

I'm pretty sure fears about this have had at least a small impact on player counts.

I have seen many people question if they should try the game, for fear of destroying their GPU's.

Mostly unfair to the game, as it is a hardware issue that only affects a small number of people, but still.

Goes to show how negative press, even if it is not 100% accurate can have an impact.

I would have given it a go I think but not if it could kill my GPU when there are no new ones available for a reasonable price, even if I have a RTX 3080 which afaik is not affected.

 

[Riccochet]

I would have given it a go I think but not if it could kill my GPU when there are no new ones available for a reasonable price, even if I have a RTX 3080 which afaik is not affected.

it's really a non-issue for 99.9% of people. And if it was, it's simple to monitor GPU power usage and adjust it down via afterburner.

 

[Zarathustra]

it's really a non-issue for 99.9% of people. And if it was, it's simple to monitor GPU power usage and adjust it down via afterburner.

Yeah, I mean, it doesn't hurt to be cautious, but it is really a tiny minority of people who have had this issue on boards with a known incidence rate of solder flaws.

If I were interested in the title, I'd probably just run it with a frame limit set in the drivers, and maybe crank up fan speed a little and keep an eye on temps.

 

[Grimlakin]

Yeah, I mean, it doesn't hurt to be cautious, but it is really a tiny minority of people who have had this issue on boards with a known incidence rate of solder flaws.

If I were interested in the title, I'd probably just run it with a frame limit set in the drivers, and maybe crank up fan speed a little and keep an eye on temps.

The sad thing is we are in the minority of knowing how to or even if we should do that. Others I would say the vast majority of others even 3090 owners have no clue.

 

[Denpepe]

it's really a non-issue for 99.9% of people. And if it was, it's simple to monitor GPU power usage and adjust it down via afterburner.

While that is true, I would prefer that Amazon aknowledges the problem their game can cause and adds a solution to the game so it becomes a non issue for everyone.

 

[Zarathustra]

While that is true, I would prefer that Amazon aknowledges the problem their game can cause and adds a solution to the game so it becomes a non issue for everyone.

I didn't follow the case closely, but I thought I had remembered hearing that the did add a frame limiter to the game, to at least prevent runaway frames during low load menu screens.

To be fair though, New World is just the trigger. No GPU that isn't already defective will be harmed. That said, to users who struggled and in many cases overpaid in order to to get their GPU and don't know how long it would take to replace it if they had to, I can see why they might want to be overly cautious.

It reminds me of back in 2010 when Sid Meier's Civilization V was launched. Lots of users were blaming the game for killing their older DX9 8800 and 9800 GPU's. The root cause was Nvidia's solder issue at the time those were made, but people are for some reason quick to blame software and unwilling to believe there could be a defect hiding in their hardware, when the latter is much much more likely.

 

[MadMummy76]

Fake news and a nothing burger!

Do people believe that a new game launch impulse numbers will stay the same for days, weeks, or forever?!

F2P games e.g. CS: GO, Dota, etc. have lost millions of players (FREE), so it's expected for New World's in-game numbers would balance out and a paid 500k concurrent gamers are nothing to look down on to tell its future.

But this is not a free to play title. If you paid for a game, you are expected to stick with it for more than one or two weeks. Half the people dropping out despite having paid for the game is like if half the people walked out the theatre before the end of a movie.

 

[Grimlakin]

But this is not a free to play title. If you paid for a game, you are expected to stick with it for more than one or two weeks. Half the people dropping out despite having paid for the game is like if half the people walked out the theatre before the end of a movie.

Bets on it going free to play in 6 months or less?

 

[Brian_B]

Bets on it going free to play in 6 months or less?

It was supposed to be F2P in the beginning. I "bought" it while it was pre-order F2P, and thus, got the game for free, which was kinda nice they honored that.

But I've played all of about 5 minutes. It sounded cool back when I signed up years ago, but it's changed a lot since then and it's no longer my cup of tea.

That said - yeah, probably will go back to F2P, or limited "free play" weekends, just to try to get player count back up. With lots and lots of Twitch cross-events.

 

[Peter_Brosdahl]

I'm guessing someone in the higher-ups feels they need some more money from this. I literally just saw a TV ad for it on Comedy Central in the middle of some South Park reruns.

 

[Zarathustra]

I'm guessing someone in the higher-ups feels they need some more money from this. I literally just saw a TV ad for it on Comedy Central in the middle of some South Park reruns.

Lol.

I Guess my take is that if you have to advertise a game, it's probably not a very good game.

This industry thrives on word of mouth, and if something is fun or interesting it spreads like wildfire. If it isn't, it doesn't.

 

[Peter_Brosdahl]

Lol.

I Guess my take is that if you have to advertise a game, it's probably not a very good game.

This industry thrives on word of mouth, and if something is fun or interesting it spreads like wildfire. If it isn't, it doesn't.

Yep, whoever greenlit that ad was definitely out of touch on the process. Honestly, at first, I thought it was a FOE(Forge of Empires) ad.