New World Aeternum Announcement Fail

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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?

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5 thoughts on “New World Aeternum Announcement Fail”

  1. Belghast

    The resentment goes much deeper than this one announcement. I first became aware of it surrounding a video that came out on May 13th supposedly covering things coming in the game. For whatever reason the team thought it would be funny to censor almost everything said in the video like it was super secret and exciting news… which itself landed like a ton of bricks.

    So the PC community was already frustrated over the cat and mouse game that they were playing about the future of the game, given that nothing had really released of note since the launch of Angry Earth in October of last year. The much panned Aeternum announcement was itself delayed by half a month or so. But like you said all of these are ways that the marketing team at AGS set themselves for a massive freaking failure.

    I contemplated writing my own post on this situation but I gotta be honest… I am not sure if I care enough to dive any deeper than I already have. I think my core frustrating is that we have not had any truly new areas added to the game since Brimstone Sands in October 2022. Angry Earth took an existing zone, First Light, that a lot of players actually really liked… and cadavered it turning it into a new expansion zone. Aeternum is doing the same thing for Cutlass Keys and going to essentially destroy another popular zone among crafters for farming a lot of resources and shifting it into a max level hard mode content area.

    Hamfisted as heck, and honestly… I’m not sure the game can recover from this. They had built up a bit of clout among the players but the past year has destroyed every ounce of goodwill.

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  2. bhagpuss

    Amazon Games must have just about the worst record of any major developer for self-inflicted reputational damage. The entire history of New World is a series of botched promotions, technical disasters and all-round ineptitude. How they ‘ve managed to make one of the best MMORPGs of recent times while apparently being so fundementally incapable of every aspect of the business their in is almost impossible to comprehend.

    Even by their standards, though, this is a spectacular own goal and yet I wonder if it even matters for them, commercially. The game sold very well on PC but it’s now several years old and hardly any of the players who bought those “boxes” still play. Most of them probably have no further interest in the game at all. The next big financial bump for New World is going to be the console launch and it may well be that the potential audience for that neither knows nor cares about the game that PC players have become attached to – the few of them who still remain, that is.

    The current marketing strategy looks foolish from a PC player’s perspective and the invested specialist press like MassivelyOP are infuriated by it but if it successfully sells the game to another few hundred thousand console players who neither know nor care about any of that, I imagine the marketing dept. will consider it a job well done. I think it’s too easy to forget that the only real purpose of a game like New World is to make money for the company that owns it and rebranding an existing game and re-purposing some existing assets so it can be sold in a new market probably makes a lot more sense than trying to eke a few more dollars out of the diminished playerbase they currently have.

    All the more reason not to invest emotionally in any individual game, I’d say.

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    1. Wilhelm Arcturus Post author

      The idea that they didn’t care about their PC users would have been a lot easier to believe if they hadn’t been hyping up their current PC user base months in advance for this big announcement.

      I mean, it is one thing to leave behind one user base for another… it happens, often when a company decides they need a change to survive… but this particular mess is either an epic fail on obliviousness or an absolutely intentional slap in the face for their current users.

      The fact that they’re trying to put the tooth paste back in the proverbial tube seems to indicate that this was ignorance rather than malice, something their past history supports. Or somebody realized that they still have to pay the bills on PC players alone between now and October 15th.

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  3. Anonymous

    Tech business involves people of different skills and expertise… Thinking that developing a game, selling it and actually earning a profit with it can be fulfilled by the same people, or people tangentially experienced on each field, leads to disaster. Tech, marketing and accounting are different business and it is foolish to cheap on personnel and hope the positions can be fulfilled by less than stellar people and live up to the big money being thrown their way. Let alone being fulfilled by the same exact people.

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