After numerous postponements, the moment of truth has struck for Amazon's first game blockbuster. The start of New World is by and large a success: the MMO attracts a lot of players, but also a lot of criticism at the moment. This mainly relates to technical aspects.
At first glance, Amazon has finally reached a milestone with New World and published the first big, successful blockbuster game. Immediately after the release, the number of players rose rapidly, with a peak of 707,000 adventurers traveling at the same time. This puts New World at the top of the Steam rankings: Nothing else is played more often at the moment.
However, gamers are not too enthusiastic, as evidenced by “balanced” reviews on Steam. A good half of the around 19,000 ratings are negative. The fault is neither content nor gameplay, which were revised in the course of test phases and already left a positive impression there. Rather, the technology is causing considerable trouble: Amazon has provided a far too small number of servers. The page newworldstatus.com shows the size of the problem with numbers. Especially in the first hours after the start there were massive waiting times, according to the site a well six-figure number of players was kept in the queue, which significantly exceeded the number of players on the servers. Waiting times were in the range of several days.
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Currently no game is played more often than the MMO (Image: SteamDB)
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Currently no game is played more often than the MMO 
Currently the ratings are only “balanced” 
The first interest in New World is great The number of servers has already been increased in the meantime, but their selection is also a fundamental problem. A maximum of 2,000 players may be on the road at the same time per server. Since someone else can create and play a character after logging out, it is more difficult to return to a character that has already been created – too many players want and have to play on the same server, which further exacerbates the problem. In addition to the new servers that have already been connected, more are to be added. In the next two weeks there will also be the possibility of a free character transfer, the developers announced.
The “queue simulator”
Reviews therefore speak of a “super queue simulator” and give “10/10 for the household”, for which one has time due to the waiting situation. It is also critically mentioned that several beta tests have taken place and Amazon operates gigantic data centers, so neither the onslaught was difficult to estimate, nor was there a lack of infrastructure. In this respect, the problems are hardly a figurehead and a wasted opportunity – a clean start could have set Amazon Games apart from other publishers, where such quarrels are also part of the standard repertoire.
Whether New World will actually have lasting success, the numbers don't give away. Placement at the top of the Steam ranking suggests the character of a hit, but Amazon also courted streamers in advance who accompanied the start of sales and thus stirred the drum. The decisive factor will be whether Amazon's efforts can retain players over the coming weeks. To that end, the studio behind the game had been working harder on endgame content during the move.
The editors would like to thank ComputerBase reader “Jakxx” for pointing out this message!