…with a new raid, actually hard and all we every asked from the game. There was a new Main Story Quest line, which ended in a whole lot of rewards, some of them skins. The Season Pass included several skins, and in total there was more than six different skinlines rewarded from the MSQ and Season Pass, multiple weapon skins, some emotes, extra random armor skins, cool skins in three different weight classes from the raid itself, not to mention cool skins in three different weightclasses for several other set items, there was three new mounts, on the (paid) Season Skin and as drops in the raid – all without counting what they put up on the Cash Store, which for this season included a full skinline for armor, four new mounts, a few emotes..
This raid brought the game from the brink of death with about 5’000 concurrent players, to have 5’000 player queue just to get in to play on one server alone – we were about 50’000 concurrent players each day since Season 10 Launch, and that was just on Steam. Adding in the PS5 and Xbox players, we were probably beating Brimstone Sands launch in player numbers.
The game had also changed leadership from Scot Lane, to Katy Kaszynski, and it all seemed to be going in the right direction.
Then this happened.
It turns out, Amazon, in a move to..save money? I dont know, they decided to fire 30’000 people world wide, apparently close to half of them being office jobs. That alone sucks, and it is absolutely horrendous the way they did it. The fact that something like that is even allowed to happen in the USA is mind blowing – people are randomly, out of the blue, getting their access restricted, and told through email that their “role within the company has changed”, some get a text message about it all. And just like that… they’re fired.
But when it comes to AGS, apparently all three of their offices, Irvine, Seattle and Bukarest, all got cleaned out. Noone is left.
How something like that is even allowed to happen, so suddenly, so abruptly, is absolutely insane. I have no other words for it. It’s legitimately insane. There’s not a single argument that can convince me of otherwise.
And as much as it is horrible for them – their situation is definitively the worst out of all of this – but it doesnt change the fact that thousands of players, who called this game their home, and thousands more that joined in once in a while, just lost their game.
Some people have spent literally thousands of hours in this game, as have I, clocking in at ~5’200 hours by now, and I dont even have the most amount of hours out of the people I’ve met. I’ve seen a few people having 10’000 or more, I know Landi over at https://newworldnews.org/ have over 15’000 hours. I have even lost count of how much money I’ve spent on this game, counting on my Steam from buying the original pre-order deluxe version, buying the Brimstone Deluxe pack, the DLC, the Season Passes, the Marks to buy skins and mounts and gearslots and as a gifted game to a friend, on PS5 with season pass and all.. Not that I ever really kept count, but as I quickly ad up the total, it is near €1’100 over the years.
I’ve met so many wonderful people over the years, from my old Company friends, Napkin, Fleur, Andicus, Bogdan, Cold, Obed, Bibi, Jefery, Hellraiser, Mike, Smekkie, just to name a few, to people I met through just playing the game or by being introduced by other friends, such as Sakis – who I met during summer when my company went into hibernation – and Mojito, Hana, Nay, Rose, Krigger, Smarty, Reaper, Joora, Kydl… the list goes on. There’s so many more that I’ve met, that I simply dont have the space to mention, but know that I remember you all, across all the discord servers that we hung out in, from BiotH, to Hub, Ninjas, LG, Baboons, How to, Nysa Raiding, and more.
Almost my entire social life moved over into this game, I ended up speaking more English on a daily basis than I did my native tongue, due to sitting down on the evenings to play games with these people, or just hanging out with them.
The game is officially now dead, and only held online by lifesupport until atleast the last day of next year. If there’ll be anything more after that, we dont know. What we do know, is that there will be no more content, no more patches, no more fixes.. they’re just going to leave the lights on and pay the electrical bill, and that’s that.
What pisses me off though, is that the higher ups that decides everything, admits to having decided that the old DLC that you had to pay for, and this new season, was all going to be free, despite all the work that was put into it, with skins, gear rework and all.. because they knew that the game would be closing down anyway.
https://www.newworld.com/en-us/news/articles/update-on-new-world
“The recently launched Season 10 and Nighthaven update will serve as the final content release for New World on PC and consoles. It is only after much consideration that we’ve reached this decision. To thank you, the New World community, for your support over the years, we have made the Nighthaven release available to you for free. To ensure all New World players can experience this content, we also made Rise of the Angry Earth free for all PC players.”
So they made the conscious decision to give us these expansions and seasons for free, because they were going to shut down the game. But they told us the decision to let us have it for free weeks to months ago, before the launch of Season 10. And as much we didn’t understand why, because this Season would absolutely have been something we could see ourselves pay for, it was really that good, now we know why. Because back then, they had already decided to kill off the game. But they told noone.
They didnt tell us before we bought the Season Pass, nor before some players bought the Season Pass and uplevelled the Season Pass with cash, nor did they tell us before some of us bought some of the new Cash Store mounts. They didnt tell us before we bought transmog tokens to transmog our gear into some of the new cool armor pieces the raid drops, nor before some of the new players got some gearsets. They didnt tell us at all, even before some completely fresh players bought the game for the first time either. They knew, weeks to months in advance, and then still let us spend money on a game they would be putting on Maintenance Mode just two weeks after Season launch. Not only is that showing some disgusting customer views…
…they didn’t even tell their own game developers. They all found out this Monday morning that they were out of a job, after having toiled for months with this new season, all this content, all these skins, all the music and voice overs they did themselves. None of them were given a heads up, until – out of the blue this morning – three entire offices of game developers found themselves in the situation where they were told that they were no longer employed.
These are the developers who sold ~17 million copies of New World as it launched back in 2021.
These are the developers who sold about a hundred thousand copies of Expansions of Rise of the Angry Earth – as that’s not tracked, the only thing we have to go on, is the fact that there was literally 137’755 active players at the same time back in the early stages of that launch.
These are the developers who sold close to 9 million copies of the re-launch New World: Aeternum, on PC alone, and we simply do not know how many console players there is, but between the server sizes and the queues, and the tracked amount of players on PC, we could estimate that there’s about as many console players (on cross platform servers) as there is PC players active, if not more.
These are the developers who have sold an estimated 50 million copies of the game by the end of 2024, with more since. And at ~$60 a pop (sometimes on sale, but then again add on the Rise of the Angry Earth DLC’s that sold, and deluxe version etc, $60 per unit is not unlikely as an average), then we’re simply talking about over 3 billion dollars. That’s not counting Season Pass sales or other Cash Store bought stuff. Even if we cut that number in half, that’s still well over a billion dollar game.
And AGS still got cut down like it was just a speck on a financial spreadsheet.
I try to have this blog as non toxic as I can, but honestly? Fuck Amazon. They’ve got a disgusting business practice, treating their customers like this, deciding well in advance to cancel a game and not saying anything, just to try to milk out as much as possible from them.. but in all honesty, the way they treated their own, the 30’000 people worldwide, almost half of them office employees and honestly who-knows-how-many is living on dirtpoor paychecks, and basically the entirety of AGS, is absolutely horrendous.
At this point, I wouldn’t be surprised if Twitch ended up being shut down as well, and I almost count on Amazon trying to make my life a living hell for speaking up against them and telling them the F-bomb.
I’m sad and I’m pissed off.
I’m sad because this is a game I love. I’ve spent so much time in that game, met so many wonderful people, put so much effort into the game one way or another, and I now know that in about 14 months, the game will be gone.
I’m pissed off, because not only did Amazon – not AGS – effectively decieve us into paying just enough more for a product they knew they were going to kill off, but also the fact that they’re cancelling a game that have so much potential, and are actually starting to live up to that potential. But most of all, I’m pissed off of how they treat their employees and seem to think it’s fine to do so. To tell people by text message that their “role within the company have changed” and to read their internal emails, some of on devices they found themselves no longer having access to anymore, because OFCOURSE Amazon also cut off all their access before they even tell their employees that they’re out of a job. And also to tell people they’re fired, not only after having their access already taken away, but also completely out of the blue. Noone were aware layoff were going to happen, until they were told out of the blue.
Like, what kind of a joke of a country does even allow such a treatment of their workforce?
USA, that’s who. Completely and utterly insane.
And while I’m not personally affected by these layoffs, these layoffs just wiped an entire game off the face off the earth, despite being a multi-billion dollar game. That just absolutely pisses me off.
So yeah, it’s not a good day for me. We, my group of friends and I, started out this season in competing in an unofficial Race to World First for the raid, and while we did get World First Kill on the first and second boss, we managed to get World Third Raid Clear, and EU First Raid Clear. I spent so much time on that game that I felt the exhaustion through the second week, and now going into third week after launch, this happens. I’m beyond tired, both from the exhaustion still sitting in since the Race, but also by how absolutely horrendous Amazon treats people, customers and employees alike.
We all thought AGS would kill off New World eventually. We did see the signs.
We just thought that AGS were going to keep New World on “life support” until they finished developing the Lord of the Rings MMO, then they’d ship New World on maintenance mode to Bukarest, Rumania, while they focused on the new MMO instead. We didnt think New World was going to have a long term life beyond a couple of more years, but that was before this huge up-swing, all the new sales, and we though the Bukarest Studio would still develop New World for a while. None of us saw this coming.
And not only is New World – and AGS itself – axed, but the big Lord of the Rings MMO is also completely dead as well. That game is just completely cancelled.
But honestly…this?
This is disgusting.