New World is Amazon's first video game hit with half a million concurrent players on Steam
Fifth-highest ever.
After a string of high-profile failures, Amazon has its first video game hit on its hands with New World.
The £35 fantasy MMO launched today and has already shot past the half a million concurrent players mark on Steam, making it the second most-played game on Valve's platform behind only Counter-Strike: Global Offensive. As you'd expect, the servers are struggling.
According to SteamDB, New World has now beaten indie hit Valheim's concurrent players peak to take the fifth spot on Steam's all-time concurrents list.
At the time of this article's publication, New World had 532,535 concurrent players on Steam. The number is expected to grow as the weekend approaches.
Amazon had already delayed New World a number of times - amounting to 17 months from its original announced launch window - and its release comes after a string of video game failures for the mega corp. Last October saw the company cancel multiplayer action game Crucible - five months after its release and four months after its unprecedented un-release - and April brought news that Amazon's Lord of the Rings MMO was no longer in development following a dispute with Chinese mega-corp Tencent.
Eurogamer's Robert Purchese enjoyed what he played of New World last month, saying: "There's something refreshingly old-school about New World, something a bit Ultima Online... If you know what you're doing, glory in New World is there for the taking, and hardcore players love that."