New World very much looks to be Amazon’s most ambitious dive into the gaming community yet. After a number of failed games it is clear Amazon Games is willing to do whatever they can to prevent a repeat. The studio is willing to do what most AAA developers won’t anymore, delaying the game for a year in 2020 and then delaying it again in August of 2021 for an additional month. This second delay came after the final beta test less than a month before launch. One of the major bugs that needed to be fixed was the infamous graphics card killing issue that took games media by storm, destroying $1500 GPUs from a number of users. It is important to note that this may also have been an EVGA issue as the cards that failed were overwhelmingly EVGA.
New World is now on the horizon, again. Let’s take a look at their immediate competition and how I think they will stack up. The obvious largest competitor in the MMO market has and from the looks of it will continue to be WoW. However, I don’t think retail WoW is what New World needs to compete against as the games are so vastly different, the direct competition is Classic WoW. Classic TBC Phase 2 started on August 18th 2021, this could have been one of the reasons Amazon pushed New World out a month. I consider Classic WoW to be more of a competitor than Retail WoW simply because a majority of Classic players are playing casually to experience the nostalgia they had a decade ago. This casual to moderate audience is the same one that games like New World targets with their horizontal progression and emphasis on “anything can be fun”.
The aforementioned horizontal progression of New World (after you hit max level and an initial max level gear) brings in some interesting competition. While they are nowhere near the popularity of WoW or Classic WoW it is important to look at other horizontal progression MMOs. The two main games in this subgenre are Elder Scrolls Online (ESO) and Guild Wars 2 (GW2).
ESO has had a dedicated albeit smaller fan base for many years. I do not think New World will pull a lot of fans away but I do think New World can learn from the mistakes of ESO with releasing new content and not dividing up the player base.
GW2 is in a similar boat to ESO with an even smaller audience, the main difference with GW2 compared to ESO is that there is no subscription fee. This has made it so there is no feeling of needing to play to make your monthly cost justified. GW2 has a third (and presumably) final expansion coming out in early 2022. While I do not foresee a risk to New World, I do think Amazon Games can learn from Arena.net on how to both maintain a die hard audience as well as what not to do to alienate your players.
Every MMO mentioned prior has a strong, but small, PvP community. I think this is an area that New World has an opportunity to take players from other games. If New World is able to maintain a large enough PvP player base to have a healthy meta and community, it will stand out from even Classic WoW. This group of players have been begging for a more skill based system for years. Only time will tell if the developers are going to stay active with balancing weapon skills and meta shifts though.
