After years of development and multiple extended beta periods, New World has finally launched. The huge MMO project from Amazon Studios has rocketed to the top of the charts on its first day, dominating the rankings on both Steam and Twitch.
New World has become Steam’s most played video game released in 2021. The title has soared up the charts, overtaking heavy-hitters like Dota 2 and CS:GO, while also beating 2021 phenomenon Valheim.
The game requires a one-time purchase, unlike a monthly as seen in WoW or Final Fantasy XIV Online, and has taken a sandbox approach to the MMO genre as it focuses on exploration, settlement building, and resource collection.
With New World’s NA, EU, and Australian servers being live, the game has over 710,000 players on Steam, making New World this year’s biggest release on Steam. The previous 2021 game that surged in popularity was Valheim, a Viking-themed survival game created by a small indie team of five. Valheim skyrocketed in popularity this year, reaching an all-time peak of 502,387.
New World launched around the globe over the past 24 hours, but for a lot of players, there has been little opportunity to get in on the action due to massive queues to get into the game.
To remedy this, the Amazon Games team has been active in implementing new servers that players can join to free up queues on other servers. Players will also be able to transfer their characters between servers for free in the next two weeks, meaning you can begin playing on a server that you may not stick with going forward.
