Amazon’s New Video Game Has Hundreds of Thousands of Players

E-commerce giant Amazon had dived into yet another arena. This time its computer games.

The company has a new computer game that already has hundreds of thousands of players at any given time.

The game is called “New World” and its success comes just about a year after Amazon had canceled its last high-profile video game.

Amazon Game Studios, the video game development arm of Amazon, released “New World” at the end of last month and it allows players to explore and build a virtual colony.

The game was previously scheduled to release in May 2020 and subsequently August 2021, but was delayed to its current date.

Since its launch, it has averaged hundreds of thousands of concurrent players at a given time on Steam, the most popular online store for PC games.

On its launch day, the game had peaked at more than 700,000 concurrent players, making it one of Steam’s biggest launches ever.
Amazon CEO Andy Jassy now believes games could well outpace Amazon’s efforts in music, movies and television.

Bloomberg reports that Jassy, who replaced company founder Jeff Bezos this year, told a GeekWire conference that Amazon had finally found footing in games thanks to New World.

“There were a lot of articles written, people saying things like ‘Amazon knows how to build everything but games, why can’t they build games?'” Jassy remarked. “It takes a few before you find a hit, or several, but they didn’t lose their resolve.”

DFC Intelligence analyst David Cole said it’s “too early” to tell if New World has the legs Amazon believes it has.

“It’s not a disaster, you could say,” Cole stated. “It’s not what we consider a huge game, in the sense that if it wasn’t Amazon, I don’t think you would be paying that much attention to it.”

Amazon also owns Twitch, the gaming-focused streaming video service.

Disclaimer: We have no position in any of the companies mentioned and have not been compensated for this article.