Amazon’s ‘New World’ is already Steam’s most-played new game of 2021

Amazon’s long-awaited New World launched on Steam on Tuesday morning, and in news that should have Amazon execs breathing a little easier today, the early buzz around the game continues to be solid.To get more news about lootwow, you can visit lootwow.com official website.

Even with server queues, New World is already Steam’s most-played new game of 2021. The previous contender, the Swedish Viking simulator Valheim, topped out at just over 500,000 concurrent players in February. At time of writing, SteamDB has pegged New World‘s peak at 707,230.

This is reportedly enough to put New World into the No. 5 all-time spot for concurrent players on Steam, behind PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds, Counter-Strike: Global Offensive, Dota 2, and last winter’s Cyberpunk 2077.

At time of writing, New World also has fluctuated between 798,000 and 850,000 viewers on the Amazon-owned Twitch network, with streamers like shroud and Fextralife playing for an audience of thousands. Several high-profile streamers have specifically partnered up with Amazon to run giveaway promotions, so this isn’t entirely organic, but it’s still an impressive figure to throw around.

New World is only the third original video game from Amazon Game Studios, despite years of effort and false starts, and its launch has widely been perceived as a make-it-or-break-it moment for Amazon’s ambitions as a mainstream game developer.

In New World, players take the role of shipwrecked survivors on the mysterious island of Aeternum, in an alternate history roughly based off of 17th-century Earth. On Aeternum, magical forces have run mostly out of control for centuries, which has created both miracles and monsters over the course of time. Players must band together into three factions—the Marauders, Syndicate, and Covenant—for protection against both Aeternum’s hostile natives and each other.
It’s a slightly strange pick for Amazon, as New World is a massively-multiplayer online role-playing game (MMORPG), a subgenre that’s currently dominated by World of Warcraft and Final Fantasy XIV. As opposed to those two games, however, New World features a real-time combat system, and doesn’t have any sort of character classes.

Instead, your character gains Core Attribute points as you level up, which you can spread out among five primary stats, and you can grind out gathering, crafting, and refining professions as you see fit. Likewise, fighting with any of the weapons in the game slowly earns experience points towards Mastery for that specific weapon. It’s an open-ended approach reminiscent of an Elder Scrolls game.

As a general rule, MMORPGs are some of the hardest games to fairly review. They’re deliberately built as long-lasting time sinks, and many of them change dramatically once you hit their endgame. New World has a level cap of 60, and few if any people will be able to reach that point before this coming weekend. Amazon itself recommends that critics get at least 40 hours deep into New World before trying to write about it, which seems entirely fair.

As such, there aren’t many actual reviews of the game at the moment. There are a few critical previews, such as PCMag’s, but at time of writing, New World‘s Metacritic page is a big fat “to be continued.” A proper critical evaluation (such as our own) is going to have to wait for a bit.