New World's Open Beta Has Hit an Impressive Player Milestone

Amazon Games’ upcoming MMORPG New World launches on September 28th. However, New World's open beta is live now, letting fans explore the wild and mysterious land of Aeternum. In fact, the MMO has already crossed an important milestone.

The New World open beta launched on September 9th. While the prevous closed beta didn't escape without criticisms, it attracted a remarkable amount of attention. That trend contiunes with New World seeing a genuinely impressve number of concurrent users on day one of the four-day open beta.

The beta's first day saw a peak of 140,000 concurrent players. That’s enough to rival some of the the most popular multiplayer titles on Steam.The exact number is likely around either 141,585 or 141,668, according to SteamCharts and SteamDB, respectively. Valve doesn’t officially publish active player counts, so the stats come from independent sites. However, SteamDB and SteamCharts both rely on information from Steam’s internal database, which is accessible to anyone with the right know-how. Regardless of the exact player count, it's a genuinely impressive figure for a game’s opening day.

The remarkably high player count puts New World’s peak just behind the massively popular CS: GO, Dota 2, Player Unknown’s Battlegrounds, and Apex Legends. It also beat out Destiny 2, Grand Theft Auto Online, and the recently released Naraka: Bladepoint. That would be an impressive feat for any game’s opening weekend, and New World pulled it off in a single Thursday. The game will likely see even higher numbers throughout this weekend. As of this writing, New World is sitting at just under 96,500 players. Still, there’s time for the game to knock its previous records out of the water. The open beta runs until September 12th, giving MMORPG fans a few more days to try it out ahead of New World’s full release.

It’s worth noting that 141,000 is still well short of what New World’s closed beta saw in July. The earlier beta peaked at 200,856 concurrent players on opening weekend. While New World saw mixed reactions in Twitch, it was still the platform's most-watched game, and not by a small margin either. The open beta pulled in 721,000 views, thanks in part to popular streamers covering the game. That’s almost twice as many Twitch viewers as the platform’s “Just Chatting” category. Meanwhile, the second most-watched game on Twitch, Call of Duty Warzone, pulled in only 246,000 views.

It’s too soon to say if these numbers will carry over to New World’s full release on September 28th. Still, the popularity of both betas bodes well for Amazon’s upcoming release. If nothing else, the developers have got to be pleased with the massive amount of fan interest in New World. It seems possible that the game is gearing up to be one of the most popular MMOs of 2021.

New World releases on September 28th for Windows PC.