New World has been completely overshadowed by Lost Ark, but Asmongold believes it can bounce back because it doesn’t require a subscription, as long as the developers release good content.
New World has fallen from grace since it burst onto the scene in September 2021. Back then, players needed to come up with creative ways to avoid queue times because it was so popular. Now, its player base is a fraction of what it once was.
Meanwhile, Lost Ark has completely taken over, both in terms of player numbers and viewership numbers.
However, Asmon believes New World can still rebound at some point down the road, and he explained why.
“Lost Ark has been a big success,” he said. “Lost Ark is Amazon Game Studios’ first big success.” It has overshadowed their other game, New World, in just about every way. Though Asmon thinks it can bounce back.
“I think that over time with New World, the experience of the game will get better,” he claimed.
“New World is going to be a lot like Guild Wars 2 in the way that you don’t have to pay a subscription or anything like that.”
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“There are going to be people that just buy the game and come back regularly to play it every once in a while whenever new content comes out.” He believes that’s the biggest asset and could draw people back in.
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“Is it ever going to get huge? Is it ever going to be a massive game with the 800K concurrent players that it had on launch? I don’t know. Probably not. I would not bet on that. [But] I do think that it will improve over time.”
The reason, in his opinion, is simple: “It’s a game that is simply ‘buy to play,’ so there’s going to be a lot of people [who still want to play it]. There’s not a barrier to entry to coming back and playing the game again.”
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“For example, there are a lot of people out there who maybe stopped playing New World [because it got stale], but if new content comes out that’s really cool and they find a reason to play it, they’re going to go and play it.”
Only time will tell whether Asmon is right. However, Lost Ark will keep getting new content too, which could keep players hooked in the long term and prevent them from returning to New World anytime soon.
Of course, there are other competitors in the MMO space too — namely FFXIV and World of Warcraft. So, the New World developers will have a lot of work to do if they want to make waves once again, but it is possible.