This is what the boss of New World says about the rapidly falling number of players on Steam – 83% less

The new MMO New World started with great enthusiasm and many players on Steam on September 28th. Two months later, the MMO has lost most of its players. The peak number fell from 913,027 to 119,135. The boss of the MMO, Scott Lane, now says how he sees it.

How has the New World player numbers developed? If you look at Steam’s peak numbers alone, the number of players has plummeted by about 87% in 2 months:

• At the time of release, New World had a peak of 913,027 players. New World was extremely popular at launch, especially in Germany.
• In November there were 357,188 players at the absolute maximum
• In the last 24 hours, on December 8th. In 2021, the peak on Steam was 119,135 players – that’s only about 13% of the original number of players.

“We made mistakes that frustrated our players”

This is what the boss of New World says: A Polish MMO site had the opportunity to ask New World boss Scott Lane a question about the drop in player numbers. Lane replied (via mmorpg.org.pl):

“I think you are referring to the numbers on Steam and while the numbers have actually fallen there, they don’t reflect 1: 1 the active players.

All new games and MMOs will lose some activity after their release, this is normal and should be expected. In the beginning, players had extremely long sessions, almost twice as long as in the Alpha. This created issues with long queues and increased the feeling that we were losing more players than we actually were as the session length readjusted to what we’d seen in Alpha.

We’ve also made some mistakes that have frustrated our players and are working harder to improve the way we work to minimize future problems. If you consider that only two months have passed, we are satisfied with the current data on player participation. Of course we want to get better and better and we try to do that too. “

Scott Lane

Some mistakes happened in the rush – should get better in the future

What does Lane say about the bugs? When asked about the many bugs in New World, Lane replied that New World was a big game, and it kept getting bigger. In the rush to improve New World, a number of mistakes were made.

You understand the negative impact that mistakes have on players and you do everything you can to make it better. In the future, they want to make some updates smaller so that they can concentrate more on the quality.

Lane hopes that in the future players will log back in to see the changes and improvements to New World. They say they will always work on the balance and bring new content, so Lane hopes the players will give the team a second chance to gain their trust.

On MeinMMO we looked intensively with the state of New World after 2 months and asked: Can the MMO still be saved?

That’s behind it: Lane describes the phenomenon that people play significantly more in the early stages of an MMO than later, when they have reached the max level. Since Steam primarily measures the “peak number of players”, ie the number of simultaneously active players, the peak numbers in this “initial phase” are significantly higher.

A frequent player is generally “more valuable” in these statistics than a casual player who may not be reflected in the statistics because he is not logged in during the “peak time”.

So Lane is right that New World has not lost 83% of its players, but that some of these players are still playing New World, but not as much as they used to. Nevertheless, it is clear that some players have already left New World, he admits that and Amazon is aware that the launch was very bumpy.

While some claim New World is dead, players say come back is a lot better now