New World players yearn for more as MMO’s population dwindles to all-time low

When was the last time you thought about New World? Probably not recently, unless you’re one of the few thousand players remaining on the servers of Amazon’s MMO, whose player count is plummeting just three months after the launch of an expansion that had the intent to save the game. 

Now that things have gotten worse and reached an unspeakable low point, those players left discussing the dying title on the New World subreddit have begun to question what’s even worth sticking around for. 

These players have come to a common consensus, though: There’s no other MMO that does all of the things that New World does, and until a competitor hits the market, Aeternum will be home for the remaining loyalists. 

New World’s hardest fans remain in the trenches

“I GOT NO PLACE ELSE TO GO,” the top comment on a highly active (by New World’s standards) Reddit thread titled “Why are you still playing New World?” answered earlier this month. That straightforward sentiment can be used to describe many New World players’ predicaments, each of whom understands it’s not that there aren’t any other MMOs on the market, it’s that none of them scratch the unique, specific, and frankly weird itch that New World can. 

The only people left playing New World appear to be those who need that itch scratched. They could go play other MMOs, but they’d be leaving at least one of New World’s core selling points behind, whether it’s the progression system, weapon leveling, over-the-shoulder, aim-based combat, or open-world, faction-centric PvP. Those players aren’t about to sacrifice any of those key elements just so one or a few of them are done better in a different context. 

“In my opinion the world they have is amazing,” one self-professed casual New World player named ZlightWork said on Reddit. “It’s beautiful and I enjoy the combat [as] a leisurely player. I love running around and just freely doing whatever I want. I don’t try to min max gear or make a bunch of money, I just have fun playing the game a couple days out of the month.”

“I’ve tried so many MMOs but I can’t find anything like it,” another player said. “It’s not perfect but when a game clicks for me it just clicks.” 

Where has everyone gone?

Over the last 30 days, New World has hit a point that it’s never seen in its two-plus-year history. For the first time, New World’s average player count dropped into four figures, with fewer than 10,000 players actively playing it over the last 30 days, according to player data-tracking site Steamcharts. 

One of the biggest knocks on New World following its initial release was its inability to maintain strong player retention numbers, even in its infancy. Between its release in October 2021 and the following month of November of that year, New World lost nearly two-thirds of its entire player base after a strong debut, according to Steamcharts.  

Last summer, a similar occurrence proved nothing changed when New World flirted with the 10,000-player cutoff. But in October, the release of the Rise of the Angry Earth expansion brought back the average player count to a number it hadn’t seen in nearly a full year. Regardless, almost all of the players who came back to the game for the brief moment of a new release have sailed on just as fast as they did in 2021. 

That hasn’t stopped players from yearning for the good old days, though. In a thread posted to the New World subreddit earlier today, players of both past and present agreed that the launch period of the game was its peak, and recapturing even a smidge of that feel would shoot a jolt of electricity back into the community. In theory, a new expansion launch should’ve worked wonders for New World—just as new expansions typically do for other MMOs like World of Warcraft and Final Fantasy XIV. But somehow, the average New World player numbers midway through March are lower than they were pre-Angry Earth. 

“For me, the fun requires extrinsic enthusiasm, such as, in-game hype, collective curiosity, mutual cluelessness, even mass [goofiness],” one player on Reddit said. “I longed for this game to wake up, recover and [heal].”