Since its release in September 2021, New World has been a hit with fans, despite its many early issues with servers being overloaded and players having to wait multiple hours to get into the game. Most of the early issues seem to be resolved now and it isn't an issue trying to get into a server, which means players can spend more of their time exploring Aeternum.
The game is still very early into its lifecycle, with it needing fixes and new mechanics such as swimming and rideable mounts to traverse the map quicker, but that hasn't stopped New World from being a hit with players and it has consistently been one of the top games on Steam every day since it launched last month.
New World became the second most popular launch of all time on Steam with over 700,000 players on launch day, only behind Cyberpunk 2077, which saw over 800,000 players jump into CD Projekt Red's latest game. Since then, New World has peaked at over 900,000 concurrent players, making it the fourth most played game of all time on Steam.
Most games tend to drop off in popularity very quickly after release. Recently, it was reported that Aliens: Fireteam Elite now has just 800 concurrent players seven weeks after it was released. New World hasn't suffered the same fate and has consistently remained in the top 5 games on Steam each day, usually only behind Valve's own competitive games CS:GO and DOTA 2.
New World is currently the third most played game on Steam today, with over 317,000 concurrent players. The game reached a peak of over 500,000 earlier in the day. This is approximately half of the players that DOTA 2 and CS:GO currently have, but it is beating out PUBG and other top games such as Grand Theft Auto 5, Team Fortress 2, and Rust.
With the Autumn/Winter releases about to get into full swing, with games such as Call of Duty: Vanguard, Forza Horizon 5, Battlefield 2042, and Pokemon Brilliant Diamond and Shining Pearl set to release next month it will be interesting to see whether New World can manage to maintain its player base throughout the busiest period of the year for gamers.
New World is available now on PC via Steam.