Amazon can breathe. For the moment. The launch of his game New World is a success, with, according to the site SteamDB, which accounts for purchases made on Steam, nearly 700,000 simultaneous players Tuesday the day of the release. It was the most played game in the world, with, on the flip side, and Amazon promises to fix it, connection issues and long queues of several hours. It was also, with some 900,000 spectators, the most watched game on Twitch, ahead of Apex Legends and Fortnite, report
Le Figaro. Since its takeover in 2014, the Twitch platform has been a property of Amazon, and at the heart of its video game strategy, also with the Lumberyard graphics engine and the Luna cloud gaming service. But what about games, the sinews of war?
“” New World “must be the game that will make us break through”
Of the three big games announced when Amazon Games was created, only one survived New World. Breakaway was canceled before its release, Crucible lived only a few months in the midst of a health crisis, not to mention the abandonment of his MMO The Lord of the Rings, yet a perfect companion to the prestige series announced for 2022. As Christoph Hartmann, vice president of Amazon Games, said at
New York Times : “ New World must be the game that will make us break through, there is no doubt about it ”. If the precise budget of the game is not known – The echoes are counting on $ 100 million between production and marketing – the giant injects more than $ 500 million per year for its video game business, excluding Twitch or Luna.
An MMORPG and some biases
In addition to installing Amazon in the game, New World also serves as a technological showcase for its offer
AWS Game Tech and its game development solutions in the cloud, recalls
Le Figaro. The game does not run on the player’s computer, but on servers in the cloud and thus makes it possible to manage and display more and more environments, characters, battles. It is no coincidence that New World or an MMORPG, a massively multiplayer online role-playing game, which takes players on board Aeternum, a mysterious and supernatural island in the era of
Great discoveries.
If it takes the gameplays of the classics of the genre, World of warcraft on your mind, New World also takes real biases, such as favoring PvP (player versus player) with several multiplayer modes (“War” with 100 players, “Breaking waves” in teams of 20, etc.), or to do without class for more freedom and an evolution of the combat system by the choice of weapons.
Finally, the game does not require a subscription to play it, it will cost players € 39.99, only PC for now. A call price compared to other blockbusters in the industry, because Amazon is betting on microtransactions like the multibillionaire Fortnite. Already with a Pirate Pack at € 4.99, the first in a series of seven by the end of 2021. Amazon, finally ready to conquer a new world?