Amazon Games' New World has seemingly dropped around half of its one million playerbase since it launched a month ago.
According to Forbes, an analysis of the data freely available on SteamCharts suggests the MMO has been losing around 135,000 players a week since it launched at the end of September, at which time it hit an impressive concurrent player peak of 913,027 players on October 3.
By monitoring player numbers at the same time on every Sunday since New World launched, the number of players simultaneously online has fallen week on week from 913K players to 726K, 608K, and – on October 23 – 508K, which is a little less than half of the player numbers the game saw at the start of the month.
Player numbers fluctuate all the time, of course, particularly for single-player games that might not have much replayability about them. New World, on the other hand, is an MMO, and therefore would likely be expecting to retain players, particularly as it's currently sitting on a "mostly positive" aggregate score from 138,000+ players reviews on Steam.
Maybe it's because of an exploit that was crashing games every time someone sent images – or worse – via its global chat client? Amazon said the issue "resulted in unsavory behavior" but stopped short of detailing what that "unsavory behavior" was exactly.
Or it might be because Amazon was recently forced to increase server capacity for every world in a bid to reduce New World queue times. Or it's possible it's because as recently as just a few weeks back, players were once again reporting that playing New World was bricking GPUs, although Amazon has firmly refuted the claims.
In case you wondered, no, there are no plans to bring New World to console just yet, as Amazon Games has been clear in its messaging that – for now at least – New World will remain a PC exclusive for the foreseeable future.
If you're just getting started with Amazon's new game, head over to our New World Factions guide for a complete rundown of all the groups you can join.
