Estimate says: New World has sold better in 2 months than GW2 and ESO since release

New World celebrated a huge success at release with almost a million simultaneous players. But how many people in total bought New World? The Steamspy website gives an approximate assessment.

How well did New World sell? There are no official figures from Amazon so far. According to the Steamspy website, however, there are around 34 million accounts on Steam New World. A range of 20 to 50 million players is shown for free users (via Steamspy).

This would make New World one of the games with the most owners on Steam at all, on a par with GTA 5, Rust and Garry’s Mod.

How accurate are Steamspy’s numbers? According to its own statements, Steamspy evaluates millions of data on Steam in order to predict the numbers. However, this data should be fairly accurate.

• The website PCGamesN spoke to several developers about these numbers in 2017 and has come to the conclusion that although they are not completely correct, they usually only differ by about 10% (via PCGamesN).
• In 2018, however, there were changes to the privacy settings on Steam, which should make the numbers a little more inaccurate.
• Steamspy itself says the stats are supposed to be accurate for 98% of the games. 2% of games are said to have incorrect dates. They also warn of falsified results through “Free Weeks” or other events.

It is somewhat unclear whether the New World Open Beta flows into the data, because Steamspy only excludes closed tests, as they do not appear in the web API. However, the Open Beta only had a peak of 50,000 players and also had its own game ID, so that websites such as SteamDB and Steamcharts can separate the two games.

New World probably has more accounts created than ESO and GW2 since release

What do the numbers mean exactly? If Steamspy’s numbers were correct, New World would put many of the other MMORPGs in the shade:

Then why are the numbers of players on Steam so low? They don’t necessarily do that. Because the numbers on SteamDB and Co. are snapshots of the simultaneous players. So if 931,000 players were online at the same time, it could have been over a million different players just a few minutes later, but more players have logged out than logged in.

Over 24 hours and also over days, many more different players log in than you would think at first.

With 136,887 concurrent players as of December 1st, New World still made it into the top 5 on Steam.

What are other estimates for New World? The website VGInsight also deals with the analysis of games on Steam. Here, the number of reviews and these are extrapolated to the total purchases as a basis. The reviews should be multiplied by about 77 and then generate correct numbers in about 80% of the cases.

VGInsight only expects 4 to 12.1 million sales at New World (via VGInsight). With 175,000 reviews, New World has relatively few ratings. Rust got about 588,000 reviews, but in the all-time record only 245,000 simultaneous players, most recently only a peak of almost 60,000 players.

Rust has around 30 million buyers according to Steamspy and 18 to 42 million according to VGInsight. So it looks like VGInsight’s estimate for New World is a little too low.

What do you think of New World sales? Would you have expected them to be that high?