I’m sure I’m not the only one who’s been simultaneously taking nervous peeks at New World’s player count the last week – and also trying to remind herself that there’s more to MMO health than numbers. Nevertheless, the numbers following New World’s Rise of the Angry Earth expansion last week must be putting a smile on the faces of the Amazon dev team, as yesterday the game crested 77,000 peak concurrent players.
To put that into perspective, we need only skim through SteamCharts, which recorded only one higher peak since the original four-month launch period at the end of 2021/beginning of 2022. The only other time we’ve seen concurrent player counts surpass this past weekend since February 2022 came in November 2022, just after Brimstone Sands and new fresh start servers. In other words, the game is peaking right now not just for the month but for the whole year.
Of course, the key difference this time is that a lot of the players currently playing New World paid again for the privilege, as the expansion came with a $30 fee, to say nothing of the seasonal expenditures that Amazon has new worked up into a business model that might actually be sustainable now as it enters its third year of operation.
Maybe a second key difference is that last time Amazon added several dozens servers to keep up with the demand and reshuffle the deck, while this time it’s added under a dozen by our count, which has kept queues on some servers high, in spite of continuing server capacity bumps from Amazon.
That doesn’t mean there are no issues with the game, however; Amazon has admitted to a long list of them and told players on October 5th that it was “expecting 1-2 hotfixes this week alone,” although as players noted, they didn’t make it in during that week.
We’ll have our own formal impressions up later this morning in our New World column, Vitae Aeternum, so stay tuned.
