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.
Bloomberg reports that Jassy, who replaced 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 suggesting Amazon 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 been a hit for Amazon, recording over 900,000 concurrent players over the weekend. But does follow a series of high profile failures: Amazon’s first game, Crucible, was notoriously sent back into beta after launch, then subsequently canned. Follow-up titles like sports-MOBA hybrid Breakaway and a tie-in for Amazon’s Jeremy Clarkson vehicle The Grand Tour fared 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 a compelling PVP sandbox (and brilliant fishing sim), or a tedious chore with a terrible jump and boring 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 its first 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.