A lot of the time, when PR tells us how many views a game gets on YouTube or Twitch, it’s an easily ignored metric – a number that’s spun to show a supposed level of game health – so we generally don’t pay that sort of thing any mind. However, one Redditor found something very odd about the view counts for the announcement trailer for New World: Aeternum, which is certainly something to raise eyebrows.
According to data gathered by Viewstats, views for the announcement trailer saw a rather surprising spike after June 17th that has continued to climb for the past six days, hitting over 1.3M views, when previously it was averaging roughly 30K views every day since its June 7th premiere.
The source of these views isn’t immediately clear, but it doesn’t seem to be coming from Amazon Games’ marketing or social media push; most of the recent posts on Twitter are calling attention to the video that introduces the MMORPG to console neophytes for example. A brief look through the YouTube channel’s other analytics on the same site further shows that none of the game’s other videos have gotten such a huge rise in viewership.
Naturally, this sort of thing is absolutely ripe for presumption and supposition, and it’s led to a firestorm on Reddit, particularly given that Amazon’s umbrella corporation owns both Amazon Games and Twitch. All the same, this is still really weird.
