Amazon’s MMORPG New World launched back in 2021 with almost a million concurrent players on PC through Steam. I was there. You were there. Steam recorded it. We all saw it happen. We are not taking the crazypills.
Which is why it might surprise you to hear that in addition to trying to relabel the game an ARPG instead of an MMORPG, Amazon is now wrangling Steam’s tools to effectively label Aeternum the true launch of the game on Steam.
The issue was first noticed by clever folks on the MMORPG subreddit: Apparently, if you post a Steam review for the game now without having purchased Rise of the Angry Earth (aka the thing you need as a PC player to unlock Aeternum), your review will be flagged as a “pre-release review,” which of course is simply not true whatsoever. It doesn’t seem to be happening to very old reviews, just that narrow band of PC players posting new reviews without access to Aeternum. No need to take anyone’s word for it; you can go to Steam and see several on the front page. Here’s one we clipped this morning:
We reiterate here that you can indeed continue playing New World on Steam on the legacy servers without Rise of the Angry Earth/Aeternum, so it’s deeply inaccurate to label reviews from such players as “pre-release.” Obviously, it’s fair to wonder how legacy PC players are being treated post-Aeternum, and their reviews of the game are just as valid now as they ever were. Likewise, a new expansion or console venture does not constitute a new game or a new launch when a game has already been fully live for three years – not in the MMORPG genre or even the ARPG genre.
Worth noting here is that since the launch of Aeternum yesterday, the Steam version of the game has seen a fresh peak of around 54K players – a number it hasn’t even come close to since the launch of Rise of the Angry Earth last fall. It didn’t top Rise of the Angry Earth’s 77K peak, however, and its average is on par with the average number of players playing last spring just before the Aeternum announcement. Reviews are also in the “mixed” bin.
Of course, we don’t know how exactly the console uptake has been by comparison; Redditors from the PS5 and Xbox X|S servers are calling it “low but not dead” thus far (which may be as much about Amazon siloing console players as actual pop), and multiple threads continue to echo the concern that (justly) angry PC players ranting on social media and in-game are a turn-off for consolers. For the game’s sake, that console pop had better be big to be worth losing PC hearts and minds… and wallets.
Stay tuned for our Vitae Aeternum column later today, as MOP’s New World columnist Tyler has a lot more to say about the situation for PC players.
