For many across the world, gaming is little more than their latest favorite app on their mobile device as mobile gaming now makes up over 50% of the entire market, despite recent changes in regulation for initiatives such as Gamestop many are still performing extremely well during the pandemic as a larger audience is attracted, some services such as Max Casinos have even suggested this growth may continue once the pandemic passes – but for many others, gaming is also much more than that.
One of the next huge anticipated releases is coming from Amazon’s Game Studios as they are set to enter the massively multiplayer online role-playing game world through their new title of New World – but there are some huge challenges that come with this. As the name would suggest, these games are pretty big and have sometimes even millions of players all coming together in big hubs at the same time, other big names in this sector can be found in World of Warcraft, Guild Wars, and The Elder Scrolls online – but with this large number of players comes to the big budgets associated with sustaining those numbers.
Now Amazon certainly has the funds to bankroll something of this size, but success needs to be found early. The games are very expensive to develop and take an extremely long time to do so, then there are the growing costs that come with continued running of the game and also the requirements to push through constant updates and new features, expansions, and other new content – as of now the game will operate as a buy to play model, meaning that there is only the upfront cost of buying the game and no subscription, whilst there will be the possibility of other costs from new expansions or in-game cosmetics.
Set for release on August 25th of this year, the game has big expectations from many and big shoes to fill – the genre as a whole has been struggling as of late, as other gaming genres like MOBA, BR, and FPS have found a growing surge of players in the past four or five years, MMORPG numbers have mostly been dropping from their heyday in the mid to late noughties, despite efforts to try and reinvigorate the market the core player base are now older with less time to play and the younger players are increasingly less interested in these games. On the other hand, there is good potential for success with streaming platforms such as Twitch and the renewed power of social media – a good few weeks topping the Twitch charts for viewership could help breathe all the life into the game that it needs for a sustainable future in the short term, and then good development can continue to carry it further – fans won’t have to wait long to see the outcome, however, and hype is currently pretty high for some new life so we’ll see where things shake out in a little over a months time.
