New World becomes one of Steam’s most played games on launch day

Amazon Games’ New World appears to have hit some big player numbers on Steam when it launched Tuesday. The new massively multiplayer online RPG saw 707,000 concurrent players at its peak, according to SteamDB. On Wednesday, it jumped to a peak of 734,000. That puts it among a handful of big titles on the list of games with the most peak players ever for the platform. 

The most-played games on Steam come from Steam Charts, which tracks player activity. On the top of the list is PUBG: Battlegrounds, which peaked with 3.2 million concurrent players. It’s followed by Valve’s own Counter-Strike: Global Offensive and DotA 2, and then Cyberpunk 2077. New World takes the fifth spot, surpassing the Norse mythology survival game Valheim that came out earlier this year. 

All those players trying to play at once have left many others out in the cold. Queue times to join can be upward of several hours, with some queues consisting of more than 10,000 people waiting. Long wait times and laggy servers for overseas players were some of the complaints players left on the game’s Steam page. To accommodate, Amazon Games added more servers and said there will be character transfers available to players in the coming weeks. 

New World puts players in the role of an adventurer shipwrecked on the mysterious island of Aeternum. They have to explore the island to unlock its powers and its secrets. 

New World is only available for Windows PCs.