On its first day, it looks like the Amazon Games MMO New World is already poised to be a hit. It has already amassed a player count of 572,689 players thus far and that number is still rising on Steam. This has landed the game in the number 2 spot for player count, only behind the ever-popular Counter-Strike: Global Offensive.
To put this into an even bigger context, these numbers are largely based on Europe servers, which had gone live earlier today. The North American servers have only just recently gone live, meaning that this number is poised to jump significantly in the coming hours.
This is made an even more impressive feat as New World is not a free-to-play game. Usually, these types of games are in a good position to score high on user counts due to the easy ability of players to jump in without any upfront commitment, though Steams refund policy has made it less of a risk to try a game regardless of cost. I doubt with an MMO you can tell if you like the game within the hours afforded by this discount policy.
This stands as the biggest hit for Amazon Games, even among the low number of releases the studio has had till now. Previously the studio had released a free-to-play game called Crucible which only lasted a short time before support was ended for it. The studio has also had a large number of games that were announced but ultimately canceled, making this success a much-needed one for the studio.
Of course, when it comes to MMOs, it is hard to measure how successful a project is in one or two days. We will have to watch and wait to see what the studio brings to the game over time to keep this player base active and engaged. That being said, this is definitely a great first step.
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