Amazon’s New World launched to great success in September, but interest in the open-world MMO appears to be fading fast. As indicated by numbers spotted by Forbes’ Paul Tassi, New World has gone from over 900,000 players at the beginning of the month to 508,000 last week, a substantial and disappointing decrease. That’s an average of 135,000 players jumping ship every week.
New World’s player count throughout the month:
- 10-3: 913,000 players
- 10-10: 726,000 players
- 10-16: 608,000 players
- 10-23: 508,000 players
From Tassi:
For most games, a decline like this wouldn’t be a problem, but for an MMO where the entire purpose is to sustain a playerbase over a long period of time, dropping to almost a third of your peak after your first month is somewhat alarming, and shows that something has to be done about player retention.
Tediousness and the lack of a great PvE endgame are two reasons that players might be leaving New World in droves, but another, more scary one might involve a code injection vulnerability that allegedly exists in the game.
From esports site Inven Global:
[…] New World players Josh Strife Hayes and Callum Upton discovered on Friday that the text boxes in the game are HTML, and that the text is not sanitized, which in short means you can run client-side code in any text box in the game. While Amazon has claimed this is not the case, there is overwhelming evidence and examples of players doing this at this point.
Source: Steam Charts (via Forbes)