New World, the new MMO game from Amazon, has finally launched, and has rocketed towards the top of Steam.
After some early tests and more than a year after it was originally due to launch, New World is now live on Steam, and seems to be off to a flying start. At time of writing, SteamDB states that more than 648,000 players are currently logged into the game. That makes New World the second most-played game on the platform right now, ahead of top-three stalwart Dota 2 and within sight of Counter-Strike: Global Offensive - both of which are free-to-play games. It also makes New World the fifth most-played Steam game of all time according to SteamCharts, behind PUBG and Cyberpunk 2077, and ahead of Valheim.
MMO launches are usually tricky affairs, but Amazon seems to have handled New World relatively well. Servers appear to be holding steady, but that did come at a bit of a cost - early this morning, each server was limited to just 2,000 players. That number seems to be gradually being increased to deal with the influx of players, but did originally lead to queues stretching as long as 236 hours - or slightly less than ten whole days.
While New World is undeniably off to a decent start, there's certainly a long way to go before its launch can be declared a total success. Server issues have the potential to pop up at any moment, and with the health of an MMO traditionally measured in months or even years rather than hours and days, it'll be interesting to see how Amazon's effort holds out.
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