After 10 years of trying and failing to break into the video game business, Amazon finally has a hit with 'New World'
Katherine Taylor/Reuters
- Amazon's history in video games is riddled with expensive failures.
- With "New World," the tech giant may have its first major hit video game.
- The new game has topped charts and pulled in millions of players since launch this week.
- Visit the Business section of Insider for more stories.
On Thursday morning, just before 9 a.m. ET, over 70,000 people watched a livestream of a man waiting in a virtual line.
Like the streamer himself, those tens of thousands of viewers were waiting for the servers to Amazon's first hit game, "New World," to open, and more than 1,000 other players were already queued ahead of him.
Since "New World" officially launched on Tuesday, September 28, the PC-only game has been wildly popular on both Twitch and Steam, the world's largest digital game platform. It's so popular, in fact, that Amazon has had to use virtual queues to keep the game's servers from crashing for too many players being online at once.
That's right: Amazon, which operates millions of servers around the world, couldn't keep up with player interest in its online-only game.
Fextralife/Twitch
On Twitch, "New World" is the most popular game by hundreds of thousands of viewers. The game pulled in just shy of 1 million peak concurrent viewers on launch day, StreamElements told Insider.
"It's safe to call it a successful launch day," StreamElements cofounder Doron Nir said.
On Steam, it's either the most popular game by hundreds of thousands of players or a close second place - hanging with multiplayer goliaths like "DOTA 2" and "PUBG" with nearly 1 million concurrent players at any given moment.
This all stands in glaring contrast to Amazon's previous efforts in gaming.
The company's last major release, "Crucible," went from a lackluster launch to being outright shut down by Amazon.
Hundreds of people spent years of their lives, and Amazon spent millions of dollars, creating "Crucible." It launched in May 2020, and was pulled from digital storefronts just five months later. It's no longer playable in any form.
"Crucible" was just the latest in a string of failed gaming projects from Amazon stretching back years.
There was "Breakaway," a multiplayer brawler that Amazon canned several years ago, and "Sev Zero," an Amazon-produced game for Amazon's short-lived Fire TV gaming initiative. The company even produced an Amazon-branded video game controller for use with the Fire TV, but it failed to catch on with consumers; the gamepad no longer works with modern Fire TV devices.
Arguably Amazon's biggest success in gaming prior to "New World" is Twitch itself, the video game streaming service it acquired back in 2014 for just shy of $1 billion. Though the service has faced various controversies over the years, it remains the dominant video game streaming platform despite challenges from the likes of Facebook and YouTube, among others.
Whether "New World" can hold on to its initial momentum remains to be seen, but at very least some help is coming for exasperated players waiting in lengthy virtual queues to get into the game's open world.
"We understand that some players are experiencing lengthy queue times and we are working hard on a few things to help address these issues," an update to the game's blog from this week said. "We are continuing to stand up additional servers and will expand the capacity of our existing servers once we have properly tested these changes."
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