The Vice President of Amazon Games believes players “wrote off” New World, using the company’s history as a way to dismiss their upcoming MMO title.
As New World is on its way to a release this September 28, Amazon Games VP Christoph Hartmann seems a little sad about its treatment so far. Forgotten and written off, Hartmann believes the game should be given more leeway, even with the studio’s long unfortunate string of canceled games.
Amazon studio has bad rep for unfinished titles
Amazon does not have a good history when it comes to game development. While the studio has had a selection of small games since 2012, it has since canceled two of its three AAA titles in development.
Breakaway died before it even came out, not even getting a release date for what it’s worth. Another MMO title, Crucible, came out in 2020 but was dead on arrival. Crucible came straight back to beta and eventually died as the team scrapped the entire thing.
Now, New World is another Amazon title still on the woodwork and it had its own issues. For starters, the game had issues with RTX 3090 graphics cards, mostly damaging and bricking highly expensive GPUs. This made the rounds of news at the time, with much of the complaints harkening back to this problem.
Amazon Games VP still bullish on game studio
The Amazon Games VP notes that players are going by rep along for their title. In his interview, Hartmann notes that players aren’t playing New World because of the studio’s past mistakes.
“I think New World is coming out of left field for many people because I think they wrote it off, I think they thought it was never going to happen,” said Hartmann to Gamesindustry.biz. “I see a lot of enthusiasm for games within the company, a lot of support — and that’s increasing, rather than people getting fed up with it.
“There’s many businesses that weren’t a home run from the beginning and just kept going and going for it. I have no indication that the company is getting tired of its gaming division, I just see support left and right. And once we deliver a big hit, which I think New World will be, we’ll just get even more support because we’ve proven ourselves.”
New World itself is coming out in a few days. Whether Amazon Games gets vindicated at this point or not is still up in the air. Players dismissing the game, however, can’t really be faulted if the studio’s history is any indicator of quality.
Featured image courtesy of IGN/Youtube Screenshot