New World’s Amazon Games has major ambitions for the gaming industry

So New World appears to be Amazon Games’ first success after two major stumbles. Is it going to be its last? Amazon CEO Andy Jassy hopes not. At the GeekWire Summit earlier this week, he argued that games could become the largest entertainment business within the sprawling company – not an insignificant ask, given the billions of dollars it’s pumped into film and TV, not to mention music.

“There were a lot of articles written, people saying things like ‘Amazon knows how to build everything but games, why can’t they build games?'” he said. “It takes a few before you find a hit, or several, but they didn’t lose their resolve.” For Amazon, that’d include Crucible and Breakaway, former of which was pulled back into beta and then canceled after launch, and the second of which was killed off before it launched at all.

“You’re going to have some games fail spectacularly,” Jassy acknowledged.

New World doesn’t appear to be one of them, though it’s too soon to predict whether it’ll break into the top echelons of the MMORPG hierarchy; it just saw a peak concurrency over 900,000 players during its first post-launch weekend, with a couple million active players per day.