Steam’s biggest launch, Amazon Web Service failure

Angry players are unable to access the game.

Image Credit: Amazon

Read also: New world: Amazon announces free server migration

It would be an understatement to say that this is very predictable. The new world, Amazon’s MMO is undoubtedly the huge success of Steam this fall. 700,000 simultaneous players, nearly 1 million viewers on Twitch, New World has the potential to attract a whole new community and become one of the leading MMOs in the next few years.

However, this launch is not going well for many players. In the question, the capacity of the servers causes the queues to sometimes get recursive. Many people had to wait for hours without being able to call. In Quebec, if it could be accessed in the afternoon, from 5pm the servers seemed full.

Image Credit: Reddit

Excess power issues and a long queue still seem to be lagging for one reason: Amazon Web Service (AWS). The global leader in the cloud server offering, it’s unnatural that Amazon hasn’t monopolized more servers in its game, especially since the company has the means and all the infrastructure that allows it. From our discussions with video game studios that use AWS for their online servers, we know that they only need to make a simple request to add connection capacity of up to two million players in a matter of minutes.

Games always see strong rises in the community when an expansion is released, or in the case of New World, when a highly anticipated title is released. On the other hand, studios know very well that this rise will only last for a few hours, as everyone wants access to new content. This sudden influx usually disappears quickly to make way for a high turnout, but far from reaching the peak seen on launch day.

Sometimes the game performs better than the publishers expected, and they end up requiring more capacity for their servers, which is the case with new games. However, in the case of the New World, it is Amazon, and therefore AWS, that lags behind, while New World represents Amazon’s video game offering. So it was easy for Amazon to set up enough servers for all the players and to ensure a successful launch in this aspect. Unfortunately, classic accounting seems to have won the day, a process that sometimes makes it happen that in game studios, network infrastructure managers are slapped with redundant servers to keep up. Make sure you don’t. Miss the launch opportunity.