The new MMORPG New World from Amazon is already a huge hit on Steam. Our author Schuhmann believes that the time for such an MMORPG hit has been ripe for 5 years. But the big studios in the West like Blizzard, Sony, and EA have missed their chance.
What kind of hit is New World? The success of New World is currently undeniable:
- On Steam, New World reached a peak of 758,543 simultaneous players on the night of September 30 – that’s extremely high for a “Buy2Play” title. It is currently the fifth biggest game of all time on Steam.
- On Twitch, New World is clearly number 1. In the last 7 days, 36 million hours of “New World” have already been watched – that’s double the hours of Diablo 2 Resurrected and three times that of FIFA 22. Even GTA Online and LoL have been significantly overtaken by New World.
- Economically, New World is a hit. Economic websites are already reporting on the coup Amazon has managed here. After 2 failures, it seems Amazon has now finally arrived in gaming.
For 5 years, there has been a trend towards mass, spectacle, and Twitch
Why was this to be expected? In the last 5 years, there has been a major shift in gaming towards multiplayer games:
- In 2016, games like H1Z1, ARK: Survival Evolved, Conan Exiles, or PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds became significantly more successful and larger on Twitch than their technical quality would have suggested.
- In 2018, Fortnite was the biggest game in the world. It created a virtual place where mainly teenagers gathered, similar to earlier times in a youth club.
- In 2020, when hardly any new games were released, small games like “Among Us” or older games like “GTA 5 Online” as role-play or the “Survival-MMO” Rust suddenly experienced a huge surge.
In the last 5 years, it has become clear that the trend in games is moving towards “social interaction” and towards Twitch as a major spectacle.
At the same time, since 2015, there have been no major new Western MMORPGs released.
The MMORPGs that were released earlier moved towards “single-player RPGs” that can also be played online. The Elder Scrolls Online became more of a “Skyrim Online” than a classic “MMORPG”. Star Wars: The Old Republic, in its latest expansions, has almost completely turned into a single-player MMORPG. Even WoW has focused on small groups and doing more alone.
This could be concluded: The trend has been clear since 2016 that there was a large player base longing to experience a “virtual world” together in a large group and to engage with the game when they were not playing: They would then watch YouTube videos, see Twitch streams, or discuss it in forums or on social media.
The time was ripe for a successful MMORPG that returns to “mass” and “spectacle”, rather than a “single-player” experience disguised as multiplayer.
That’s why the big studios should be annoyed: Actually, all the “big players” in the West had a game in the works to break into this gap.
But ultimately all major publishers missed their chance.
This is why it went wrong for Blizzard
This was the chance for Blizzard: Blizzard had been developing a new “MMORPG” called Titan since 2007.
The game was supposed to be a class-based shooter where players would develop their character and give them strong abilities. Additionally, Titan was also supposed to support “non-combat” abilities.
The idea was for Titan to take place in a “sci-fi version of Earth” where players would go about a normal job during the day and fight at night.
This is why the chance went wrong: Blizzard discontinued work on Titan in 2014. They couldn’t balance the abilities. According to chief developer Jeff Kaplan, the game simply wasn’t fun.
From the remnants of Titan, Blizzard later developed Overwatch.
This is why it went wrong for Sony
This was the chance for Sony: A studio from Sony, “Sony Online Entertainment”, developed the new MMORPG Everquest Next from 2009 to 2016. It was supposed to be released for PS4 and PC.
Everquest Next was not supposed to be a sequel to the MMORPG series Everquest, but set in a parallel world with its own approaches.
Features of Everquest Next included, that it was to support a special AI system, to keep the narrative fresh. Additionally, the environment was meant to be destructible, and players would have the option to build and expand the world.
This went wrong: Sony parted ways with the studio Sony Online Entertainment. They continued as “Daybreak” and achieved a hit with H1Z1. It was quickly decided to discontinue the development of “Everquest Next” – supposedly the game simply wasn’t fun.
Other stakeholders in the project said: “They could have made it”. But evidently, the development of Everquest Next was an investment that could no longer be managed without Sony’s support.
This is why it went wrong for EA
This was the chance for EA: The studio BioWare developed the online shooter “Anthem” for EA from 2012 to 2019, which launched in 2019 with great attention for PC, PS4, and Xbox One.
Anthem was “the game where everyone is Iron Man”. It was praised for its strong gameplay loop and atmospheric world.
While Anthem was not an MMORPG, it had a similar “push” hype in 2019 as New World did in 2021.
This went wrong: The development of BioWare was rocky. Ultimately, the team was able to finish Anthem, but had no energy left to further develop it after release. Just resolving the many issues in the game would have required an effort that EA and BioWare apparently no longer could or wanted to make.
Although BioWare had concepts for how to fundamentally rework Anthem with a skeleton team, EA did not implement these ideas.
Instead, they discontinued the development of the shooter.
Titan, Everquest Next, and Anthem would have been 3 games that all had the chance to benefit from the changing needs of MMO players in the last 5 years. But in the end, none of the Western studios seriously tried to leverage this new desire for “community” and “spectacle” in the MMORPG space.
New World has now shown that the time is ripe for such a game.
In 2018, we contemplated in a large article what a “successful new MMORPG” should look like, today we know it:
It is time for a new MMORPG, but the era of WoW killers is over
