On July 29, 2025, the 9th season of New World begins. In order for the community to truly play the new Capture-the-Flag mode, the developers are resorting to an unpleasant measure.
What kind of measure is this? On the official Discord channel of New World, the developers announced on July 21, 2025, that they will limit access to PvP modes with the start of season 9. Specifically, it says:
At the beginning of the Season of the Banner, it is important to us that everyone has the opportunity to enjoy this new mode. For this purpose, we strive for short waiting times for Capture the Flag by temporarily limiting the number of available PvP game modes. Outpost Rush will be disabled from July 29 to August 8. The team will monitor waiting times and take necessary measures to keep them short and thus optimize the player experience.
Amazon Games on Discord
The launch trailer for New World Aeternum:
“Ouch”
How does the community react to this announcement? Under a report from massivelyop.com about this announcement, readers summarize it as follows:
- Snoid writes: “This is a sign of a game with a healthy population.”
- StoneLegion adds: “Your game is so dead that you have to force people to play features they might not even want to play… Ouch.”
- Dug From The Earth sees it that way as well: “Yes, forcing players to play content they might not want to play has always proven to be the best approach.”
Is New World really in such bad shape? From the peak of 913,634 concurrent players, today, almost 4 years after release, only a fraction remains – according to steamdb.info, the MMORPG from Amazon Games last crossed the 10,000 mark in March 2025.
Currently, the daily peak on Steam is under 8,300 concurrent players – along with the console players, of course.
However, not only these unofficial numbers prove that Amazon Games has failed to sustainably increase player counts with the Aeternum restart and the subsequent seasons. The official statistics from Amazon Games itself paint a grim picture: The well-known MMORPG from Amazon once had over 900,000 players concurrently, but the new event hardly reaches 500
