Player numbers play an important role in MMORPGs, and since the release, the numbers of New World have noticeably declined. But while the first players are already announcing the death of the MMO, MeinMMO editor Alexander Leitsch calls for calm. Because a drop in player numbers after launch is the most normal thing in the world.
What about the player numbers? New World had a strong start on Steam. On October 3rd, the Sunday after release, 913,634 players played the new MMO from Amazon simultaneously. This puts New World in 5th place for all-time peaks on Steam (via SteamDB).
On Friday, October 22nd – over three and a half weeks after release – the game hit its lowest score yet. “Only” 453,385 players were online at the same time.
On reddit, the first threads appeared where New World was already referred to as a “dead MMO” (via reddit). Colleagues such as Forbes.com or the Polish site MMORPG.org.pl also report the significant decline in player numbers and attempted to find explanations for it.
However, this decline is completely normal and was to be expected, regardless of all the problems.
In fact, I am even pleasantly surprised by the still high player numbers:
- On the one hand, New World indeed has insane many problems that urgently need to be addressed. The bugs, exploits, or the deactivation of the Outpost Rush should not be downplayed by this article.
- On the other hand, this number of 453,000 is only about the “concurrent players”. The number of those who log in per day is likely to be many times higher.
Hardly any game maintains the numbers from release weekend
Why are decreasing player numbers “normal”? Every game that gets a lot of hype before launch attracts the most players at release. Because everyone wants to be there at the start, ride the hype, and talk about their experiences.
At launch, a game is completely new and unexhausted. There are hardly any guides, playthroughs, and you can still discover things “first”. Many even take time off to be able to dive into their favorite game directly. Accordingly, the numbers are quite high.
However, not every player can bind themselves permanently to the purchased title and drops out at some point. They may not like the game or there might already be a new, more interesting title. At the same time, the people who took vacation will also play less after some time. This makes setting new records more difficult.
What do typical developments of player numbers look like? In terms of player numbers, it doesn’t matter whether the release is an MMO or a single-player title:
- Cyberpunk 2077 launched on December 10 on Steam with over a million concurrent players. It thus reached 3rd place in the all-time Steam charts. Two weeks later, on December 24, there were only 303,464 players left, which is less than 33% of the players.
- Dota Underlords reached 202,334 concurrent players on the Sunday after release. Just two weeks later, on July 7th, only 98,995 players were in peak – less than 50%.
- Even with every Destiny 2 expansion, this trend can be observed. The game reached a peak of 242,284 concurrent players on November 10, but already had only 94,838 players in peak by November 30 – here, too, only about 40% of the players logged in.
Unfortunately, there aren’t that many illustrative examples for MMORPGs, as many titles were only released on Steam afterwards. A game that really launched on Steam in the West is Swords of Legends Online, which peaked at 18,806 players during its release weekend and had only 9,308 players left two weeks later, on July 25.
However, there are exceptions to this rule:
- Surprise hits like Valheim or years ago PUBG often reach their peak only after some time after release, until the success has spread. However, player numbers for both have also dropped significantly again.
- Service games that are developed further over the years can still improve their player numbers afterwards, as is the case with WoW or CS:GO after switching to free2play.
Were the declining numbers for New World to be expected? Yes, because there was hype surrounding the game beforehand. Just days before, it was number 1 on the sales charts at Steam, and Google Trends also shows how high the search volume has spiked (via Google Trends).
Of course, most players would take a look around the release, and naturally not everyone would stay, especially with the rather unusual gameplay styles like the combat system or the low number of abilities per weapon.
And even existing players will have reduced their number of hours per day – this can also contribute to the fact that the peak numbers are not as high anymore.
More interesting than the first drop in numbers after release, however, is for me the question of how the player numbers will develop after the first major updates and possible expansions. Because here Amazon has to show whether they can keep New World alive in the long term, because only then can a service game be successful.
New World still has strong numbers for an MMORPG
How strong are the player numbers of New World really? If you look at the numbers from New World, you can see that there were always at least 250,000 concurrent players online on the weekends, peaking over 500,000. The average was about 385,000 players constantly online. However, this doesn’t directly say anything about the total number of players.
However, if you roughly assume that each player has spent around 5 hours in New World (some more, some less), then there would have been about 2 million players online alone on Sunday.
Direct comparisons with player numbers of other MMORPGs are difficult because most companies do not disclose their numbers. However, there are indicators that one can orient oneself by:
- A YouTuber calculated that Retail-WoW likely had fewer than 2 million active players in July.
- RuneScape reached all game versions (RuneScape 3 and Old School RuneScape + mobile versions) in June 2020 the highest value since documentation began in 2013. There, 220,000 concurrent players were online at peak (via misplaceditems).
- Guild Wars 2 has a total of 16 million game accounts created since 2012. This includes both purchased and free-to-play accounts (via GW2). At launch in 2012, the developers also reported that 460,000 players were online at the best times (via GW2).
- ESO, on the other hand, boasts 17 million accounts since 2014, although a game version always had to be purchased.
So when comparing New World with the big names in the genre, even on this Sunday, when numbers were nearly halved from release, it doesn’t look too bad.
What do you think of the player numbers of New World? Do you find them rather positive and are you worried about a downward trend?
A big problem with New World is currently the PvP mode Outpost Rush. Because this was deactivated again immediately after its launch:
New World has problems with an important PvP mode – has to deactivate it immediately again
