New World breaks 200,000 concurrent players on Steam

The beta for Amazon’s upcoming MMO New World eclipsed 200,000 concurrent players over the weekend as players prepare for the game’s release in August.

Testing for the game, which started early last week, will run until the beginning of next week. And while the beta is “closed,” anyone who pre-orders the game can get access.

The game’s current 24-hour peak is 200,856, according to Steam Database. Only five other games have a higher peak concurrent player count over the course of the past 24 hours.

New World’s closed beta started on Tuesday, July 20. Soon after, the game hit more than 190,000 concurrent players, but it hadn’t quite reached that landmark 200,000 figure.

One reason for the closed beta’s massive popularity has been its exposure through content creators on Twitch.

In the past week, New World is the fourth most-watched game on the platform with 23.6 million hours watched. Top content creators who have played the game include Fextralife, TimTheTatman, and JoshOG.

Meanwhile, Twitch’s most popular MMO streamer Asmongold has racked up some viewership for the closed beta on his alternate Twitch account (zackrawrr), where he doesn’t partake in the same sort of theatrics you’d expect from his main channel (Asmongold).

Amazon’s testing for New World hasn’t been all positive notes, though. Early on, some players with high-end graphics cards reported that the game was killing their GPU, forcing Amazon to address the issue.

Those problems appeared to only affect people with a very specific model of GPU, the EVGA GeForce RTX 3090. EVGA has since offered to replace people’s GPUs if they were broken while playing New World.