I don’t think we’ve gotten to that point yet and I’m not talking about the “they’re losing money” part, but they’re not trying to push the game in the right direction by all means. Unfortunately I think they still do not realize who their real target audience is.
2 Likes
I’m convinced New World was Amazon’s throw away project. Their actions thus far says that don’t care about appealing to the market. They just threw a one time Hail Mary with this game. And basically put it into maintenance mode at the beginning of 2022.
I don’t think you can mess up this bad consistently without doing it intentionally. AGS did everything polar opposite to current successfully active populated MMOs. It feels like these screw ups are forced to happen.
5 Likes
They are hiring many people, i don’t think they are losing money.
1 Like
No. Amazon Games is owned by Amazon. As of writing, their SEC filings indicate they have north of 60 Billion cash on hand. Keep in mind this is money they can spend right away on anything they want. But that’s not the whole picture. Long term assets they own close to 300 billion. Sure, they have 150 b in liabilities, but banks are not going to require them to pony up anytime soon.
So they have anywhere from 60 to 360 billion in assets they can play with. Sadly Amazon Games only got mentioned 1 time in 1 sentence and it was regarding they are developing a new game. That’s it. No balance sheet, no P&L. So we really don’t know how New world or AG is doing financially. My guess is they are breaking even or losing money, that’s why parent company Amazon is embarrassed to mention them at all in their SEC filings. That’s my speculation.
Whenever you open a new division/sub company or company in general, in the first few years you will likely lose money. But if you stick around, do the right things, borrow money when you need to, eventually everything will be paid off and you’ll begin to earn profits. Telsa was unprofitable for the first 10 years, but investors saw the opportunity to make a huge return say 15 years from now. Investors know almost all companies lose money in the first 3 to 5 years. They don’t care about the company’s current performance as much as their future performance.
Amazon Games has a huge advantage here. Its parent company is Amazon. They do not need to spend money to woo institutional investors. Both institutional and retail investors already invest heavily in Amazon, it’s just up to Amazon the parent company to decide how much money it is willing to provide to Amazon Games. With the departure/firing of head of Amazon Games I think 6 months ago, it is my speculation that Amazon higherups are not very happy with the direction Amazon Games is going.
So to answer your question, yes AG is either losing money or barely breaking even, and the loss of playerbase has certainly embarrased or perhaps angered Amazon parent company, otherwise they’d be bragging about AG on their SEC filings.
I’ve made many posts about my personal and perhaps professional advice for AG. I won’t say much about what I do in real life, but let’s just say I hold substantial positions on AMZN. Amazon the parent company is all about customer-centric. Founder Jeff Bezos credit Amazon’s early and still ongoing success to its obsessive customer-centric motto. Who is AG’s customers? We are. Are the decision makers at AG listening to its customers? I certainly don’t feel that way. Do I see hope in AG? Yes, but Amazon parent company must take swift action. Put customer-centric people in charge of AG. Hire more developers, solve problems and test them thoroughly before patch, no filler updates. Focus on PVE instead of PVP first. Hire more forums staff so they can assign feedback to developers and hold developers 100% accountable for the changes. If they screw up, then find better. That’s the only way AG will ever grow in my opinion, and any otherway we’re heading to you know what. There’s been many topics on predicting the demise of New World and AG, at first I didn’t pay too much attention, but with each day passing and the sub-par results of the game, it’s hard to keep faith in AG unless they begin to listen and take rapid actions.
Again, New World may have began as a “PVP” game, but in order to survive and thrive, it must be a PVE game first. Especially with huge problems in PVP (I haven’t touched PVP in months, boring, bots, bunch of toxic groups in OPR). As with any MMO, you have to have a lore, a story, New World has begun to realize this as they introduced the Tempest, however, that alone won’t cut it for me. Why is WoW still so successful after 20 years? The graphics sucks compare to NW. However, the story. Immense story. WoW’s PVP sucks too, that’s why they don’t focus much at all about it. They put all of their efforts into the story, and PVE.
Not to mention, WoW has privately learned this lesson long ago, toxic PVP player base actually is the #1 reason new and old players quit. If AG wants to see more playerbase, it’s simple, take action against toxic PVP player base. This may hurt short term, but in long term, this will greatly benefit playerbase quality and quantity. There are toxic PVE too but the lion share goes to PVP. Something about the average personality of a PVP only player - they thrive on power, and will do anything and everything to get it, constantly, and they thrive on going after people, even go as far as harassing people, belittling them, etc. That’s toxic. And nobody wants to be in a toxic environment.
5 Likes
They are, however they are having a very hard time filling those positions. This begs the question why are the positions not filled, some as old as 4 months, maybe longer. Is it because AG is too picky? Is it because not enough qualified candidates? Is it because work culture? Is it because of leadership at AG? I really wish Jeff Bezos would spend one of his 10am high IQ meetings on AG. I might bring this up during the next earnings call.
Think about game engine, and i am laughing at you , make some research Azoth Engine, Lumberyard, hope you could find the truth in all this mess.
1 Like
I know that AG is essentially bought, it use to be called something else. Now investors don’t really care about what engine the game is running or whatever. What they care about is past performance, current performance, and future performance. That’s why AG has yet to bother improving the game engine, because investors simply don’t care, most of them are in their 50’s, the larger investors, they barely understand computers. They are masters at fundamentals, and that’s what they want to see. Player base (user base). Price to Earnings, EBITDA, Growth in the next 10 years. I could write all day about this, but bottom line is I don’t even think Amazon parent company cares about AG. It may already have write AG off as a failed project, like their Amazon Phone. If that’s the case then, as a big fan of NW, I’ll have to prepare myself for the day AG terminates NW.
And I hate to say this, but in a way, all the feedback we are providing to AG – can be viewed as a way to save AG from going under, what happens when AG goes under? Unemployment.
There are two reasons why Toxic PvP is so prevalent in MMO’s. They are, by design, easier to master and easier to exploit than a typical PvP game and casuals will participate occasionally for achievements or perhaps out of boredom.
In addition, there is a sort of abused child syndrome going on. These toxic PvP players have been teabagged out of CS:Go, Overwatch, League, or wherever, and they repeat that behavior here. I like to think about it in terms of sports. If a pro baseball player ever played community softball, there is no chance they would show-boat and insult the other team, even if only it was to not be embarrassed.
1 Like
Isn’t that for the game they are making with Unreal5?
AGS Is Moving to Unreal Engine For New MMO - YouTube
-
They made a massive initial haul in cash.
-
What they have going right now is enough to sustain a typical game of this scope with moderate updates.
New World has two things going for it that people don’t mention. As the AGS flagship, they can hire new programmers and “train” them on New World, before filtering them off on other projects. If you’re going to pay for training, you might as well have that work pay you back right?
Also they are data mining the fuck out of us and attempting to determine exactly what gamers do when they play. All of this info will be heavily used and will heavily influence any future games.
If New World is currently a failure, than what online, non-sequel games that have been released in the past 4 years aren’t a failure? People have such a weird “2 million concurrent users or go get the headstone” attitude towards New World.
The most concerning thing right now is that PvP is and has been on life support, and while they’re focusing updates on PvE, that controversial server merge pre-patch was almost definitely to keep PvP alive for a few more months until they could get the PvE side of the game to a solid place.
1 Like
They sold over a million copies, but In the end New World has become a niche game, and as a company is better to work in the next big game and sell another million copies than continue to work in this little tryhard lovers space that doesn’t even give revenue by a p2w system or a subscription.
I love NW, have over 3th hours playing. But it is what it is and when another big game finally arrives (maybe throne and liberty / ashes / riot’s MMO), this will be buried.
The team has shown big efforts to take the right direction, but sadly I don’t know why but they can’t push one change without breaking the game. Everytime. As players we are full of hopium, but that’s a reality check.
All I can say tho is thank you, because 40$ for 3000+ hours is a bargain.
They really arent making anything tbh not when all you have have is garbo skins and world transfers. They can’t even monetize their game right
In my 20+ years of MMO gaming. I’d never thought I’d see a gaming company fail at monetizing their game. While until New World, it’s literally the easiest thing to do in an MMO. Just put some cool eye candy in the cash shop. And MMO fans will pay hand over fist for it. Just look at GW2, ESO, FFXIV, and BDO. People pay over 30$ for one flashy good looking piece of cosmetic.
1 Like
They have made a couple of good pieces so far for cosmetics but the bulk of them are still just as bad. At the moment i would even pay just to have a name change or an appearence change if they improved the character creator also at one point they were talking about some kind of battle pass but idk what ever happened with that
also i spent way too much on eso lol between the premium sub every month and mounts lol
My Flame horse in ESO costed me like $300 by itself. I have many mounts like that. My house in ESO costed me over 100$. Let’s not even talk about the hundreds of other pieces of cosmetics, that I have on my ESO account.
I make my living as a global tech recruiter.
One of the areas I’ve hired into is gaming.
Some of the roles I’ve filled at Producers, Game Designers, Game Developers.
Outside of gaming, I’ve gone a lot of software development type roles.
I would hazard a guess, based on my experience speaking with candidates, that they don’t want to work with lumberyard. They want to work on Unreal Engine.
On top of that, designers and developers will look at the rep of games and often play them in order to make a decision on if the company is right for them.
This, on top of seeing how sloppy patches etc, gives a very bad image and most will see this is a bad move for their career, amazon or not.
They can see everything on forums.
Would you want to move in this direction for your career? Or would you want to go work at intrepid studio’s on unreal 5 with a studio that’s innovating? Some people from AGS have already been comfirmed as going to ashes of creation studio, intrepid.
So yes. They will struggle to get decent developers and passionate gamers that understand the gamers themselves.
2 Likes
They didn’t do very well that way, this isn’t a PvP game since alpha when combat was skill based, all the disaster that followed was thanks to the PvE approach they took.
AGS has objectively worst customer service I’ve ever experienced in any industry. It is actually shocking and I’m sort of in disbelief.
1 Like
*This. The game failed financially but its a test bed to build up past performance and data mining/user metrics. Lots of mid to large size employers lose money on Federal contracts or Commercial Operations for a business unit or division but have funds elsewhere in the business organization to keep things running for awhile. Plus, users investing any time or money in NW mean less time and money in a competitors game. Its an expensive way to try to impact other companies until you develop a succesful non-niche game.