Vague Patch Notes: Why Amazon killed New World when it didn’t have to

Amazon deciding to toss New World into maintenance mode is not really what I would call a tragedy. It’s a shame and something that didn’t need to happen, though, and I think at least one of the most interesting elements to come out of this is a discussion that was started in our comments about why Amazon doesn’t just sell the game off to someone else to manage it. After all, if it’s not making them enough money, surely the company might as well make some money off of the project, right?

Now, that speculation is wrong. Amazon isn’t going to sell the game to someone else because the company has no reason to do so. But the reasons why that won’t happen are worth examining because they also do a very good job of explaining why this happened in the first place. And it starts by understanding something that is self-evident, at least from where I’m sitting: Amazon making money off of New World has never really been the point.

Keep in mind that I’m not saying that Amazon did not want to make money from Amazon Games; quite the opposite. I’m saying that Amazon Games was able to be a money pit for a long time before it started to impact the health of the company as a whole, and that’s self-evident because for a long time it has been. This is not some huge money-making division, but not only has Amazon consistently pumped more money into it, the company has even pumped extra money into propping it up. The game got a whole episode of Amazon’s little video game anthology series, you know. That costs money to make and produce.

Of course, that anthology series deserves a second look when you think about the games on its lineup. Some of them make sense as longstanding popular franchises, like Armored Core and Mega Man and Unreal Tournament. But others really did not deserve a shot in there. Concord was a huge flop, for example. Exodus isn’t even out yet. It’s almost like the entire series was less about the most beloved video games in the industry and more about who was willing to pay for a spot for the promotion.

This is fine, as far as it goes. But it kind of puts the entire Amazon Games lineup into perspective because since the beginning, the whole studio was just been Amazon’s attempt to buy its way into the game industry.

You might think that this isn’t really a problem, and indeed, it really isn’t. The fact that the corporate side of things has always been about manufacturing a big hit isn’t an issue so long as the people making the game are focused on making something they genuinely care about. While it’s indisputable that New World had its issues on launch and ever since, it’s also clear that the people still working on the game wanted to clean up those issues and make it the best game it possibly could be, and it was enjoying a real second wind.

Sure, the console launch took too long and caused problems when Amazon was clearly trying to downplay its MMORPG nature, but at the end of the day, New World had settled into a mid-tier space – the sort of thing that you can easily keep running for a long while with a reasonable budget and a core invested group of players. This is, by any reasonable standard, a win.

Unless you’re Amazon, and you don’t want a modest success. A modest success doesn’t let you claim victory.

This might sound incredibly cynical, and that would be because it is, but it seems pretty clear from how Amazon’s corporate side of things killed two other games because they didn’t have immediate success that the goal in development was always to establish Amazon’s gaming division as being top-of-the-line. It’s not a novel goal. Microsoft’s console division has been running for more than two decades now based on the exact same principle, that if we sink enough money into this, eventually we just win.

The problem with New World wasn’t that it hadn’t reached a point of sustainable operations; it’s that sustainable operations were never really the goal.

The problem with New World wasn’t that it hadn’t reached a point of sustainable operations; it’s that sustainable operations were never really the goal. Amazon did not want a lower-mid-tier success that could keep humming along. It wanted a huge hit, and the console launch was its last chance to hit it big, something that very clearly did not happen.

Let’s be clear, though: This is not and has never been about Amazon trying to astroturf the game into relevance. That hasn’t happened. The push has been pretty obvious and above board, with all the promotional material (including that animated series) swirling around and pushing the game really hard. Nobody needed to be tricked into liking the game. There were plenty of people who did like the game. You might not understand why, but it is true; it just never mattered to the execs because the game wasn’t a runaway success.

And in no small part, this was not something the development team could ever fix.

Over the course of its development, New World went from being a free-for-all PvP experience into being a PvE game and you could visibly feel the game lurching as it tried to adjust that course. A lot of its issues at launch came simply from the fact that it launched before it was ready while it was trying to jump tracks at full speed, so to speak, and that’s going to introduce some jank and some problems. But the developers were committed, and they were trying to make the game work. The one tragic element of this is that a bunch of developers who genuinely have tried their best are losing their jobs because corporate leadership wanted them to accomplish a goal that was never realistic.

Amazon could absolutely sell the game off to someone who would keep it going, but the problem is that just as it did with Crucible, the corporate side of things would prefer to bury it and try to memory-hole the title as a whole. It might be successful at that. Because it isn’t a huge game, it’s not exactly inconceivable that a lot of the interest and attention is going to drop off in just a day or so once the immediacy has gone.

If I have a hope for this game, it’s for people to not let Amazon do that. It’s for people to remember that even if you didn’t like the game (and I sure didn’t), it is not a game that was so hopelessly dire that it needed to die. If that were ever the basis, it would have shut down a couple of months after launch. We’re talking about an end to development when the game was experiencing an uptick in interest, when corporate looked at its odds of ever becoming the biggest title on the block and decided, “Nah, let’s pretend we never knew about it at all.”

And that sucks. It’s a corporate decision made for the most atavistic corporate reasons possible. Even if this wasn’t your favorite game, you should be mad about that, and it should influence the way you think about Amazon’s entire mode of operation when it comes to producing art instead of just serving as a storefront.

Sometimes you know exactly what’s going on with the MMO genre, and sometimes all you have are Vague Patch Notes informing you that something, somewhere, has probably been changed. Senior Reporter Eliot Lefebvre enjoys analyzing these sorts of notes and also vague elements of the genre as a whole. The potency of this analysis may be adjusted under certain circumstances.