New World Sees Year-High Player Concurrency Following Rise Of The Angry Earth’s Launch

October 9, 2023 Marc Marasigan Comments

More and more players are flocking to New World to explore the Elysian Wilds and experience everything else that the recently released Rise of the Angry Earth expansion has to offer. The open-world MMORPG’s concurrent player numbers have tripled over the past week, cresting at 77,500 players over the weekend.

The last time that the game’s peak concurrency exceeded this weekend’s numbers was when the Brimstone Sands expansion and fresh start servers launched in November 2022, and the launch rush in late 2021 to early 2022 before that. However, players didn’t need to pay to get access to new content back then, which bodes well for Amazon’s revenues this quarter and maybe even for future expansion releases. Factor in the paid seasonal passes that the studio introduced earlier this year and you’ve got what looks to be a pretty sustainable business model.

Another key difference is that Amazon has apparently decided to limit the number of new servers that it will be opening this time around. Instead, the studio has resorted to bumping up server capacity, presumably to preclude the need for server merges once the launch rush has died down. While that’s all well and good for Amazon, it’s left players to deal with multi-hour queues until the population stabilizes or they decide to open more servers to accommodate everyone.

Meanwhile, the studio promised one or two hotfixes coming this week with more on the way to address the long list of known issues in Rise of the Angry Earth.