New World’s success has Amazon CEO convinced games could be the company’s largest entertainment sector
It took a few tries, mind.
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Amazon’s colonial-flavoured MMO New World seems to have done well for the tech giant—well enough that CEO Andy Jassy now believes games could well outpace Amazon’s efforts in music, movies and television.
Bloombergreports that Jassy, whoreplaced company founder Jeff Bezos as CEO earlier this year, told a GeekWire conference on Tuesday that Amazon had finally found footing in games thanks to New World. He even jabbed at Bloomberg’s own reporting earlier this year, with the outlet suggestingAmazon doesn’t know how to make a good game.
“There were a lot of articles written, people saying things like ‘Amazon knows how to build everything but games, why can’t they build games?'” Jassy remarked. “It takes a few before you find a hit, or several, but they didn’t lose their resolve.”
New World has indeed beena hit for Amazon, recordingover 900,000 concurrent playersover the weekend. But does follow a series of high profile failures: Amazon’s first game, Crucible, was notoriouslysent back into betaafter launch, thensubsequently canned. Follow-up titles likesports-MOBA hybrid Breakawayand a tie-in for Amazon’s Jeremy Clarkson vehicleThe Grand Tourfared little better.
It also remains to be seen how long New World will survive long-term. Our own team remains split on whether New World is acompelling PVP sandbox(and brilliantfishing sim), or atedious chorewith aterrible jumpandboring houses. Speaking to Bloomberg, DFC Intelligence analyst David Cole said it’s “too early” to tell if New World has the legs Amazon believes it has.
“It’s not a disaster, you could say,” Cole reckons. “It’s not what we consider a huge game, in the sense that if it wasn’t Amazon, I don’t think you would be paying that much attention to it.”
New World has, at least, survived long enough to see itsfirst post-launch update. Arriving earlier this week, Update 1.0.1 includes a raft of bug fixes, changes to the game’s AFK timer, and (thankfully) a warning dialog box to prevent you for accidentally leaving those terminally long queues.
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20 years ago, Nat played Jet Set Radio Future for the first time, and she’s not stopped thinking about games since. Joining PC Gamer in 2020, she comes from three years of freelance reporting at Rock Paper Shotgun, Waypoint, VG247 and more. Embedded in the European indie scene and a part-time game developer herself, Nat is always looking for a new curiosity to scream about—whether it’s the next best indie darling, or simply someone modding a Scotmid into Black Mesa. She also unofficially appears in Apex Legends under the pseudonym Horizon.
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