14 | June | 2024 | The Ancient Gaming Noob

I don’t know who needs to hear this, but if you are holding a big announcement in front of a lot of your fans, live or online, and think you can speak to just some segment of that audience in a way that the rest won’t hear… I have some bad news for you.

It won’t work.

I mean, go ask Wyatt “Don’t you guys have phones?” Cheng how it plays out when you have your core PC audience gathered before you and you announce a mobile game.

Anyway, Amazon Game Studios (AGS) announced New World: Aeternum this past week at Summer Game Fest and, as I barely pay attention to New World these days, I wasn’t sure what they were really on about. Was this a news game? A spin-off from New World? A version of the game just for consoles?

The messaging wasn’t exactly clear. I mean, I had predicted a console release for New World back in my 2023 New Years predictions, largely because the game UI and general design suggested that consoles were coming. So was that it?

All I could see was that current New World players were pretty upset at what AGS had announced, causing a firestorm on the slice of social media that follows the game, which in turn attracted my gaze.

Re-enactment of my moment of discovery…

Over at Massively the text they quoted suggested that AGS was trying to pitch New World: Aeternum as something other than it was, heavily emphasizing the “specifically designed for consoles” aspect of this and calling it an “action RPG” rather than an MMORPG, with emphasis on solo play.

Fortunately, Massively actually pays attention to the genre and didn’t run with the face value message that some other outlets ran with… I saw a headline saying New World was being replaced, helpfully linked below.

All of this came across very much as a desire to dump their old PC customers in favor of some new potential customers, and the PC customers let their feelings be known in the customary way. The New World page on Steam is lit.

That is going to sting for a while…

Part of the problem… part of the colossal failure on the part of AGS… was hyping this mystery announcement to their current player base and then, at announcement time, having a sales pitch for a completely different audience. Good thing it wasn’t at a live convention… I can just hear them asking, “Don’t you guys have consoles?” or something worse as the audience reacted badly.

There is always somebody out there ready to pounce on this and say that gamers are entitled brats and the problem is theirs. And certainly there are gamers that behave badly. But when you set in motion all the elements of a disaster, and then the disaster occurs, blaming the audience for reaction in an obvious and completely predictable manner just isn’t going to cut it.

Anyway, to their credit I suppose, AGS could see the reaction even if they couldn’t read the room in the first place… those around during the early days of the game will recall a time when they couldn’t seem to hear players at all… and started in on a clarifying their message into something simple to understand. Rumors were quashed that this was a new game, that current New World players were being abandoned or left on a deprecated development path, or that they would have to buy a new game, along with a dozen other flavors or panic and outrage.

If I am reading the summary right, New World: Aeternum is just branding for consoles really and that a host of new features are coming with the update that will land on October 15th with the console launch, and that current PC players who purchased the Rise of the Angry Earth expansion last October won’t be required to buy anything new. There is even a splashy infographic to sum things up.

What does New World Aeternum bring to the table?

Damage control is in full effect. There is a video to go along with it.

Now, can AGS placate their PC players after such a bad misstep and regain trust?

If they can keep from putting their foot in their mount again it is possible, though it would be nice if they let go of the idea that they’re now an ARPG. I get that they want to brand themselves as something more approachable for the console audience, which tends to be less accepting of the MMORPG genre title. But the game is what it is and miscommunication was what got them in hot water in the first place so maybe learning something from the experience would be a refreshing change of pace?