Sunday 17th October 2021
Hype about “New World”
Amazon ends embarrassing gaming lean period
From Michael Bauer
For years Amazon has been struggling to gain a foothold in the gaming market and is investing billions. But all video games from the online retailer’s house flop. A PC role-playing game could now turn the tide and the company senses its great opportunity.
Films, music, streaming – Amazon can actually point to success in all areas. The online retailer is even represented in the gaming sector with the Twitch platform, but the development of its own video games has been the black sheep in the investment family for the internet giant since 2012. With the online role-playing game “New World”, the in-house production studio is now experiencing a boom for the first time and senses the huge potential of the games market.
The genre of massive multiplayer online games (MMO) is not reinventing “New World”. The PC title for around 40 euros is set on the fictional island of Aeternum in the 17th century. Every player becomes shipwrecked and washed ashore with nothing. From here you have to explore the new world and take territories. The central resource is the coveted Azoth rock, which at the same time ensures that the flora and fauna are transformed into monsters and the dead into zombies – a good dose of fantasy.
The online players then come together in the world in order to complete certain tasks (quests) together or solo and to improve their own character in his skills as in a role-playing game. These are all MMO basics, but the game’s combat system is a little more responsive. Timing properly in hitting, dodging, and blocking is crucial in fights. There are also great battles against others Online gambler.
The hype surrounding the game is enormous. On the release day at the end of September, the influx was so great that around 600,000 players on the Steam platform only half came to one of the servers. For the rest of them, that meant pulling a virtual waiting number, some of which were in the five-digit range. That meant waiting up to eight hours. But those who have made it usually draw a positive conclusion. There are hardly any lags, i.e. image jerks, the areas are not flooded with other online players and the quests can be completed in the game without any stumbling blocks. For an MMO game, this is probably the best possible start, apart from the waiting time on the servers, which has now been fixed.
“New World” makes Bezos cheer
“After many failures in gaming, we finally have a success,” tweeted ex-boss Jeff Bezos exultantly after the release of the game. Because what was before “New World”, Amazon would like to sweep under the table. The ambitions in the development of video games had been enormous since 2012, but many projects – apart from several mobile games – were not even published. If a game from Amazon Game Studios came out, it was withdrawn from the market a little later.
The copy-paste approach that Amazon used to develop video games did not go down well with the masses, and the implementation was always not very original. The online retailer always wanted to learn something from the competition. The game “Nova” was based on the type of the global hit “League of Legends”, but was crushed in 2017. The “Fortnite” clone “Intensity” came to an end two years later. 2020 was the end of the “Overwatch” imitation “Crucible”.
Amazon had failed because of its in-house corporate structures. Since the beginning of the gaming division, which was founded in 2012, the company has brought many well-known developers and decision-makers from the game industry on board.Bloomberg“Report with the regulations of the group alienated. In essence, Amazon follows 14 principlesthat executives should use to guide their employees. These correlate very little with the gaming industry. While Amazon is driven by data collection and evaluation, in the gaming industry it is also decided on the basis of emotions which elements are essential for a game. In the development of video games, arts and entertainment are very decisive factors that determine success or failure, but cannot be squeezed into numbers.
In addition, according to “Bloomberg”, there is the ignorance of the top decision-maker and vice-president of the games division, Mike Frazzini, who once started as a manager under Bezos in the company and slowly worked his way up. He has little plan for video games, employees reported to the magazine. He had problems distinguishing between video sequences and actual in-game events. Frazzini only asked about the color scheme or the completion of the game, although there was no official deadline for the project.
Jassy sees huge potential in the games sector
According to “Bloomberg”, Amazon spends $ 500 million annually on the video game division. And that doesn’t include the investment in the Twitch gaming stream platform, which the company acquired for a billion dollars in 2014. So a lot of money that has more or less silted up so far. The only bright spot so far has been the competition, which has also been battered by setbacks. When it came to video games, Facebook, Apple and Google were also unsuccessful.
“New World” is now supposed to usher in the turnaround for Amazon and pave the way into a promising market. At least that’s how new CEO Andy Jassy sees it. In the long run, gaming could even become the largest division in the company’s entertainment sector, as he emphasized at an event organized by Geekwire magazine. It takes a few setbacks or several setbacks before you land a hit, but you have never lost your resolve, said the Bezos successor. Critics see “New World” as a successful, but not an exceptional PC title. It could almost be described as an irony of fate that a game that is about expanding the territory with colonialist features brings success to the former online bookseller and now a diversified group. At least this Amazon digression did not end in disaster again.