New World is currently the most popular game on Steam

Amazon’s MMO New World launched earlier today, and it’s apparently great if you like queues.

To put the login issues players are experiencing in context however, it’s maybe worth noting that New World is currently the most popular game on Steam, knocking CS:GO from its perch within hours of release.

New World currently has 694,612 concurrent players at the time of writing according to Steam, and was over 700k at earlier points today. SteamDB has similar data with some nice graphs.

It’s not uncommon for big new releases to break the top ten, but it is rare for them to immediately claim the top spot. New World isn’t free-to-play, either, it’ll cost you £35/€40 for a standard edition from Steam.

People have been buzzing about New World for the past year, since some of its closed beta tests impressed hardcore fans of MMOs. Fans of MMOs are almost never impressed, in my experience, and I can’t remember the last time a new MMO released that didn’t have the air of a funeral march about it.

Perhaps the long queue times aren’t the advert for their server tech that Amazon would have wanted, but this is also the first time Amazon have released a game where the problem is too many players rather than too few. Amazon’s Breakaway was cancelled after negative response to alpha tests, while shooter Crucible flitted in and out of closed betas until calcination caused to to evaporate entirely.

If you do manage to connect to a New World server, take a look at our guide to the best New World weapons for tips on how to play

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