New World celebrated a great success at release with nearly a million simultaneous players. But how many people have purchased New World in total? The website Steamspy provides an approximate estimate.
How well has New World sold? There are currently no official figures from Amazon. However, according to the website Steamspy, about 34 million accounts on Steam own New World. For free users, a range of 20 to 50 million players is reported (via Steamspy).
This would place New World among the games with the highest number of owners on Steam, approximately on par with GTA 5, Rust, and Garry’s Mod.
How accurate are the numbers from Steamspy? Steamspy claims to analyze millions of data points on Steam to predict the figures. However, these data are said to be quite accurate.
- The website PCGamesN spoke with several developers about these numbers in 2017 and concluded that while they are not completely correct, they typically only deviate by about 10% (via PCGamesN).
- However, in 2018 there were changes to privacy settings on Steam, which is supposed to make the numbers somewhat less accurate.
- Steamspy itself states that the statistics should be accurate for 98% of games. 2% of the games are said to have incorrect data. They also warn of distorted results due to “Free Weeks” or other events.
It is somewhat unclear whether the Open Beta of New World is included in the data, as only closed tests are excluded by Steamspy since they do not appear in the web API. However, the Open Beta had only peaked at 50,000 players and had its own game ID, allowing websites like SteamDB and Steamcharts to separate both games.
New World likely has more created accounts than ESO and GW2 since release
What do the numbers mean exactly? If the numbers from Steamspy are correct, New World would overshadow many of the other MMORPGs significantly:
- At the beginning of 2021, there were nearly 18 million created accounts in ESO. It is unclear whether players from a Free Week, which takes place from time to time, are also counted.
- Guild Wars 2 recently mentioned the player counts in summer 2021. Since the release, over 16 million accounts have been created (via GW2). Here, the Free2Play accounts are included.
- Final Fantasy XIV reportedly had 24 million created accounts by October this year (via Play3). Here, it is also likely that the free accounts are included, especially since a change in the summer of 2020 has made it genuinely worthwhile.
Why are the player numbers on Steam so low then? They are not necessarily low. The numbers on SteamDB and similar sites are snapshots of simultaneous players. So, if 931,000 players were online at the same time, it could easily be over a million different players just a few minutes later, as more players log out than log in.
Over 24 hours and even days, many more different players log in than one would initially think.
With 136,887 simultaneous players on December 1, New World still managed to rank among the top 5 on Steam.
What do other estimates for New World look like? The website VGInsight also analyzes games on Steam. Here, the number of reviews serves as a basis, and this is extrapolated to total sales. Reviews are supposed to be multiplied by about 77, which typically produces correct numbers in about 80% of cases.
However, VGInsight estimates that New World only has between 4 and 12.1 million sales (via VGInsight). With 175,000 reviews, New World has comparatively few ratings. Rust has about 588,000 reviews but peaked at only 245,000 simultaneous players, and recently only at just under 60,000 players.
According to Steamspy, Rust has around 30 million buyers, and according to VGInsight, 18 to 42 million. It seems that the estimate for New World is somewhat low from VGInsight’s perspective.
What do you think of the sales figures for New World? Did you expect them to be that high?
