The new MMO New World is successfully launched worldwide on Steam. But nowhere is the interest as great as in Germany. New World has underestimated this surge, which is why there are such long waiting times in Europe.
This is how global interest in New World is distributed: Based on Google Trends data, one can see how interest in a topic is distributed worldwide.
Google records all search queries related to “New World” globally and maps which countries have the highest interest in the game.
From the data, we see:
- New World is mainly a game for Germans, Austrians, and Scandinavians.
- In Germany, interest in New World is 3 times higher than in the USA and 4 times higher than in Great Britain.
- Particularly in South America, where there are dedicated servers, New World plays hardly any role relative to Europe.
Germans apparently love western action MMORPGs
Is that common for MMOs? No, it depends on the game. Germans love a certain type of western action MMORPG:
- Interest in World of Warcraft is highest in South Korea and Cuba. In Germany, WoW is only about half as popular as there.
- Final Fantasy XIV is 3 times more popular in Japan than in the USA and 7 times more popular than in Germany.
- People search for Black Desert 8 times more often in South Korea relative to Germany.
But the games The Elder Scrolls Online and Guild Wars 2 are very popular in Germany. Here Germany ranks in the top 5 for each and is close to the respective leaders.
In Europe, nearly 400,000 players were in the queue
Did Amazon expect this surge in Germany? No, evidently Amazon underestimated the interest in New World, especially in Europe and Germany.
New World started with a handful of servers recommended for German-speaking players.
However, the number was quickly increased, and now there are 45 servers designated for German players in New World.
If you look at the data from an unofficial site regarding queues and player counts in New World, you can see that the player influx was highest at the European data center in Frankfurt.
Only Europeans experienced these extreme waiting times in queues: At peak, nearly 400,000 players were queued in Europe.
Amazon apparently assessed the number of required servers for the US-West and South America regions well. For US-East, they roughly got it right. Only for the server numbers in Europe and Australia did Amazon apparently grossly overestimate.
Therefore, Amazon faced the biggest problems in Europe in reducing the length of the queues. While in other regions queues flattened quickly, only Europe still has such significant issues.
Only the servers in the eastern USA have comparatively long queues along with us in recent days.
Amazon is now doing everything to reduce the queues:
New World is blocking 43 of the 45 German servers for new players
