Amazon’s ‘New World’ Looks Like Its First Success After Years of Failure

Amazon may be one of the biggest companies in the world, growing big enough to help propel its billionaire CEO into space, but it has struggled endlessly in the video game market, trying to break into both with games and its streaming subscription service.

Perhaps Amazon’s biggest success in gaming is buying Twitch and not fully exploiting it, although not as profitable as they would like, far from a rival like YouTube. But it’s in game development where they really went off the rails.

Over the past few years, Amazon has only really released one game, the blasted game The Grand Tour Game, with a Metascore of 52 that even die-hard fans of the series didn’t seem to care too much about.

Furthermore? There were only cancellations. Breakaway was a team brawler that got called off. Crucible was an offer based on the 12-man Last Man Standing class that was canceled. Two mystery projects named Nova and Intensity have been canceled. And a high-profile Lord of the Rings MMO was canceled due to a dispute with Tencent, after the other megacorp acquired a partner they were working with.

It has been… difficult, and yet all this failure seems to be able to finally lead to a light at the end of the tunnel, New World.

New World is a sprawling MMO that has itself undergone a number of revamps and spent years in development. It was originally accused of being insensitive to indigenous peoples with its clear colonial themes, and those aspects have been cut and reshaped into something less offensive. Now it exists as a fantasy-based MMO that indeed has the early vibes of the American colonies, but in a more palatable package.

And it’s also… apparently pretty good.

New World is currently in a beta period which has indicated that the game is very promising. It’s been doing long-standing MMO icon conversions like Asmongold, and I’ve seen all kinds of players from different games playing the beta and talking about their plans to play the game nonstop when it launched.

New World has consistently been at the top of the Twitch charts throughout the beta, and not even when some of the biggest streamers are online. It’s an unlikely potential success, given how difficult it is to launch an MMO, let alone one based on a brand new IP address, but it has performed well and, as such, looks destined to be the first. consistent and potentially successful Amazon. Release.

It’s also a step ahead of rivals like World of Warcraft and even the booming Final Fantasy XIV, given that unlike those games, it’s an MMO with no subscription model. This has long been a staple of the genre’s most successful games, but instead it’s more of the live-service route, where there are no sub-fees, just an up-front payment. , then in-game microtransactions. Some players have expressed concerns that the game is potentially paid for, depending on what’s on offer in the store, but it’s unclear how that will play out in the final product. .

Either way, New World is looking to break Amazon’s doomed streak of failed releases, provided nothing disastrous happens with the final product. Whether it gets them to start figuring out how to be successful in making other games in other genres and becoming a real studio to be reckoned with is a whole different thing, but you have to start somewhere. And it looks like they start with New World.

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