New World is officially in maintenance mode following massive layoffs at Amazon Games, which saw some 14,000 jobs cut, including those tied to the MMO. Mentions of AI and the sudden nature of this move threw players into an uproar, and they are now actively review-bombing the game.
As we covered yesterday, New World, Amazon's MMO and WoW rival, is going into maintenance. The game won't receive any new content from here on, which could be an overture into a complete shutdown in the coming months. The game came out in 2021 and was (and is) far from dead, peaking at around 40,000 players daily, which is a lot more than most games can hope for.
It's a fairly large community, and the sudden nature of this move has sparked total outrage, leading players to review bomb the game's Steam page. As a result, the reviews are now "Mixed" both in the recent and the overall categories. The former is on the verge of dipping into the "Mostly Negative" bracket, only held up by negatively-toned reviews that are, for some reason, set as "Recommended."
But no matter if they're a thumbs up or down, the sentiment is overwhelmingly negative and aimed against Amazon and its behavior, with fans saying the company should be "ashamed," that it "stabbed New World in the back," and that it is overall a "disgraceful" company. Words far harsher than these have also been used.
Players are even blaming AI and Amazon's affinity towards this new technology for New World's development cut. And while it isn't exactly clear what role AI had to play in this whole ordeal, Amazon's Oct. 28 blog post certainly does signify a shift in attitude, which could adversely impact other segments of its gaming division.
New World is not the only game under the corporation that's being scaled back. Amazon is halting "a significant amount of [its] first-party AAA development," which'll impact about everything the company might have been working on, such as the Lord of the Rings MMO.
The move above, while not yet the sore end for the MMO, is probably spelling the end of New World as we know it, which further highlights why movements like Stop Killing Games are so vitally important in this day and age. If the time comes, I hope Amazon will provide an end-of-life implementation that'll let players enjoy the game post-mortem, offline or on private servers.
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The post ‘Corrupted’: New World fans slam Amazon for ‘killing’ their game’s active development appeared first on Destructoid.
