I dont think so , very bad publicity to Amazon that has its name involved.
What did this sell 500.000 players x 40 , so 20 millions ? For a company that factures ~8 billion a month , i dont buy that.
I Think this is pure lack of experience on the business and amateurism of people from double helix games.
No.
That they sold well over a million copies of the game, and the game continues to be in the market. Again, the bar was low – their prior title had to be withdrawn after it was released. New World successfully launched. That doesn’t mean the game isn’t riddled with bugs, but the bar wasn’t “release a great, amazing, bug-free MMO that makes us the industry leader in the MMORPG industry”, but rather to release a game successfully, which they did.
You can still have a successful release, with the game itself being disappointing. That is the case with New World, and in that case it still did what Amazon needed it to do.
Not just establishing market presence, I feel as if it is likely that they want to show that their AWS servers in line with Lumberyard (now renamed to something different), can sustain multiple hundreds, even up to 2250 players as of right now, within a single world.
Making it of interest for other companies to make use of this.
Beyond that, Richard Lawrence has also suggested to see New World be offered on Luna, Amazon’s cloud gaming service. As such, it could likely become a package deal for Amazon. Subscribe to Luna, get New World access. Making it another platform to drive sales in for Amazon.
Knowing consumers, the linked platform rewards, helps drive players to Prime as well as Twitch. All in additional benefit to Amazon.
Ever heard of the old saying, “any publicity is good publicity”?
People are still massively hearing about this game. Good or bad, it’s irrelevant in the long run. It’s being spoken about.
Just look at Cyberpunk 2077 for example. Despite its issues at launch, in 2021 it’s STILL projected to reach over FOUR MILLION sales. That in addition to the whopping 13 million sales in Q4 2020, despite all bad press. With roughly 5 million on Steam pre-ordered. And know the best of it all? Peak player count for Cyberpunk 2077 didn’t even match New World’s.
We as a community have no idea on the total ‘box’ sales for New World. But going by concurrency alone and known figures from other titles, I wouldn’t be surprising with somewhere in the 6 - 7 million ballpark. Even after a Steam cut, AGS would already have netted quite some revenue in that case. Meaning that they can afford to continue working on this. Produce more content, work on paid DLC as well, keep improving the midgame content to lure in new consumers. There’s ample of money to be made here.
Even right now during the Steam sale period, on my relatively dead server I’ve seen various people in the level 10 - 20 range pop up in the lower level settlements. The bad press isn’t stopping these people. AGS is getting their further revenue.
Whilst you raise some good points in your response, im not sure the old saying applies to the MMO market like it does to most of life.
Lots of people will research MMO’s before they invest their time and money into them, simply because of the game style requiring hours of your life being spent on them. If you find hundreds of forum posts/news articles highlighting major flaws, are you more or less likely to give it a go?
Edit: The big difference between New World and Cyberpunk was that Cyberpunk launched across multple platforms. The average age of a PC Gamer is around 38 years old, most adults dont have tonnes of free time to waste away on an MMO unless they feel its worth it.
Guild Wars 2 has a 45 minute content patch every 4 months. It’s not going strong at all. LFG dies for everything (raids, fractals and all) after 10pm until either 9am on reset or 6pm in the evening.
I always felt like Guild Wars 2 was Lineage 2 for people who couldnt handle hardcore playstyle.
Amazon have never been a cash grab. They have always went into markets to dominate long term. They operate at a loss for as long as that takes. Also they own half the servers of the whole internet. So even though your comments may turn out to be true I seriously doubt that.
And it is already subscription based through Prime with perks. It’s a great way to get more people signed up for prime and into twitch and whatnot.
I’m pretty sure now you never played GW2, but whatever. That comparison makes no sense.
Apples and oranges.
I played GW2 for a couple of days and found it extremely lack lustre, just my opinion of course, im sure many people enjoy it
A couple of days for a MMORPG, and then comparing it to another. No way you significantly participated in the open world and PvP in that game in such a short game.
You make absolutely no sense.
In the meantime, GW2 sold - yes SOLD, for MONEY - several expansions.
But we are on the New World forums, so this discussion is out of topic and over.
I was replying to you specifically who raised GW2, i didnt realise you decided when a topic was over.
It is something AGS need to say, is their plan. B2P isn’t in any way a sign for just selling the game at the start and forget it. AGS is a studio that failed their 2 first games, and New World was the redemption, so we don’t have much idea what is going on on the management side.
I believe the team is pretty small for the game and the pressure is high, they had cut as many resources possible because, you know, all the previous failures.
Well, lets be fair here. If you’d do that, nobody would be playing Runescape anymore, only OSRS would have survived. Yet, Runescape keeps maintaining a rather steady playerbase. Also, World of Warcraft, would have been dead… ten years ago.
Next to that, speaking gaming in general. If we’d go by bad publicity scaring people off… NOBODY would buy any CoD title, NOBODY further would have bought Cyberpunk 2077, NOBODY would ever purchase a single EA product, EVERYBODY would have serious second doubts about ever purchasing a Ubisoft product.
But yet, here we are. These companies sell absolute millions of units for every single game, every single year. Despite CoD for example having an average metacritic user rating of around 4 for like… 10 years?
When has this ever really stopped people 
.
Which isn’t something that truly stops people from playing MMO’s anyway. Plenty of people play MMO’s very casually. Back in the days I played FFXIV actively, the only other hardcore members within my FC were the members of my own raiding group. Dozens of other members, were highly casual. About a third of the FC didn’t even play more than about 5 hours a week. Which was fine, we didn’t take them in for needing to be sweaty neckbeards like us. We took them in because they were enjoyable people.
And heck, these days I have a pretty busy life myself as well. I do spend more time in New World than those folks did within my FC in FFXIV. But I’ve had plenty of weeks already in which I didn’t really surpass 15 hours either. I’m nowhere near the 500 hour mark, let stand 700+ we see some on these forums at already.
Prior to this, I played ESO again for a few months. I played it about 5 to 10 hours a week. No need to vet hundreds of hours a month in MMO’s like these to just enjoy yourself.
And with some form of dungeon finder tool along the way for example, I do feel as if the market for casual players is only going to grow further. Ultimately, there’s more money in that group of players than what most hardcore players realize.
I see you behave on forums just like you behave in the game.
I never said the topic was over. Just our little discussion about GW2 which is out of topic.
But keep on trolling.
I’m not sure I’ve ever met you ingame to be brutally honest, couldnt have made a lasting impression!
Oh you did, and you made a mess of the community you joined on Hades too. You ended leaving after destroying it. And before you ask, I’m not “Dylan”, I’m someone else, but I witnessed the whole process. So sorry if I don’t put too much credit in your concept of how a game should be and anything else you could be saying here.
But as I said, it’s out of topic.
Probably some PVE nonfactor kid, nice!
Another display of your personality.
The kid could probably be your father (and thankfully he isn’t) and was doing PvP in UO in 1997 when you were just a toddler if even born.
What a marvelous person you are.
You just can’t help yourself ;D