If you’ve been following Amazon Game Studios release of their, once highly anticipated MMORPG, New World, then you know that their launch didn't exactly go as smoothly as they would have liked. As we head into 6 months after release, the players that have left the game on Steam in early December have yet to return, which has resulted in over a 90% drop in active daily players since the game launched in September of 2021, according to SteamDB.
New World, despite all of its flaws, has still managed to maintain a following of tens of thousands of players daily. While the player numbers are markedly down from the all time SteamDB high of over 900k players shortly after launch, it’s not entirely uncommon for steep declines in active players once an MMORPG has released. However, when you look into the statistic related to what point players seem to drop off from playing New World, it tells a different story.
According to Steam’s Global Achievement statistics, nearly half of all players, or 48% managed to make it to level 30, which is noted by the “Progress III: Showing What I’m Made Of” achievement, but this drops dramatically to only 16% of players who have made it to level 60, earning the “Progress VI: That It? What Else You Got?!” achievement. Another interesting statistic revolves around the first tier of PvP kills, ”PvP Kills I: Vengeance Granted” achievement, where players are tasked with killing 500 other players. Steam statistics show that only slightly above 8% of players have completed this achievement. New World heavily relies on PvP battles as part of their end game, so at nearly 6 months from launch, one would expect a higher percentage of the player population would earn the PvP-based achievements.
Amazon Game Studios has continued to work diligently to fix the game, and build a long-term strategy to make its various game modes more fun. Over the past few months, we’ve seen gold duplication issues, exploits, and a disabling of character creation, but the team has been adamant that all issues will be remedied, and new content is on the way. In an interview with Amazon Game Studios World Experience Lead Mike Willette, fears of the games development priorities were addressed, which included what players should expect from the next big release:
“We are going to have some intermittent releases where we focus specifically on bugs, balance, and bots. We will also maintain releases that are more content and feature focused. For example, our February release is specifically focused on polish and bugs. Our March release will target new features with some bug fixes included.”
- Mike Willette, Amazon Game Studios World Experience Lead, New World
With numerous games on the horizon, including another popular MMORPG published by Amazon Game Studio, Lost Ark, there may be a difficult uphill battle for AGS to reclaim their post-launch high of 900K active players on Steam. Initial impressions aside, New World still has an opportunity to earn back the hundreds of thousands of players that have moved on, simply by providing new content, to a reinvigorated, stable game. Are you still playing New World? If not, what would it take to bring you back? Let us know in the comments.
