New World player counts keep climbing, nearly a million concurrents on Sunday
Making corpo dad proud, too
As MMOs often do at launch, New World had busy servers and long queues to get in game last week. That's certainly not stopping folks from attempting to play though, as New World hit another concurrent player record for itself. It was already the most popular game on Steam last week with over 700,000 concurrent players. As of yesterday, New World's peak player count was nearly a million players. We don't know how many of those folks are hanging around in those server queues, of course, but they're all at least trying to play.
According to today's Steam stats, New World's peak player count today hit 913,634 players at some point today. SteamDB backs that number up, putting that peak at about 7pm BST (11am PDT) on Sunday, October 3rd.
There's been quite a frenzy for New World since its launch day. To help get more players into the game, Amazon have been taking all sorts of steps such as adding an AFK timer to boot inactive players, to adding more servers, to disabling character creation on servers that are already full.
Apparently those #bignumbers have been enough to make corpo dad proud. Jeff Bezos tweeted on Friday calling New World a success, linking to a CNBS article calling it a smash hit. "After many failures and setbacks in gaming we have a success," Bezos said. "So proud of the team for the persistence. View setbacks as helpful obstacles that drive learning."
One of those big setbacks was Amazon's free-to-play shooter Crucible which did not come close to similar concurrent player counts and eventually got canned last November only a few months after launching in May.
I admit I was expecting a muted response to New World, really. Ed said that its open beta didn't convince him to drop Final Fantasy XIV. I also wasn't enticed by an MMO that seemed to be using the aughts playbook, albeit with a bit of fresh action combat and modern beautification. Color me wrong then, all 913,634 of you out there in Aeternum.