The whole world has heard and seen the pictures of Amazon.Com Inc.’s $1,000 household robot. But it wasn’t the company’s biggest product launch this week. Far more important, and with wider implications for Amazon’s business, is New World — the company’s first major video-game hit.
The technology giant on Tuesday quietly released this online role-playing game. To many people – perhaps including the company – New World is becoming a huge success. On day one, it broke popularity records and reached over 700,000 concurrent players, overwhelming Amazon’s servers. At this time, customers have to queue for hours to join the New World session.
Obviously, Amazon did not expect this much demand. Ironically, the owner of Amazon Web Services would have a problem with such capability, not lost on gamers, who flooded online forums with complaints.
Ultimately, though, it’s great news for Amazon and a far bigger deal than its Astro Robot, which was also unveiled on Tuesday. To be honest, it’s surprising that Robot is getting so much press coverage. It can do basic home monitoring tasks, but that’s all. Without weapons, Astro can’t lift or clean anything like many vacuum robots on the market. Essentially, it’s a tablet on wheels with an Alexa voice-recognition assistant.
The technology seems to be either nascent or, worse, not ready. An engineer working on Astro told Vice that the robot’s capabilities were flawed, and that it would probably fall down the stairs. It’s no surprise that Amazon is selling a limited amount of robots on an invite-only trial basis later this year.
On the other hand, New World is an instant success. It comes after a series of high-profile gaming failures for the company — from the cancellation of fantasy sports game Breakaway in 2018 to the shuttering last summer of Crucible, its first major budget release. If the launch of New World had failed, Amazon could have been forced to abandon gaming altogether — a disastrous prospect, given that the video-game industry is one of the few remaining large technology verticals. It’s a $176 billion market that could move the needle even for a trillion-dollar company.
Fortunately, Amazon’s gaming efforts have now been revived. Like many others, I haven’t played the game yet. But I tried a pre-release version earlier this month and was impressed with its design and solid game-play mechanics.
this is only the beginning. As a massively multiplayer online game, the new world will require a constant flow of new content to keep players engaged. But Amazon has finally played a harder role by attracting a larger audience of gamers. Now it has a real chance to become a major force in interactive entertainment.
Tae Kim is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist covering technology.
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