New World, Amazon's surprise-hit MMORPG, recently celebrated its first anniversary, and the team revealed a bunch of diverse player statistics that have built up over the past year, one of them being that the game has been played for a whopping 569.1 million hours total. The announcement was done via their official Twitter account, where an attached infograph showed off a lot of specific player stats like total number of NPC enemies killed (17.3 billion), total number of trees chopped down (6.3 billion), total number of minutes streamed on Twitch (12.4 billion), and more.
New World is a third-person action game strongly centered around player interaction. Unlike other MMOs, the game's economy is completely player-run, dependent on trading and material availability. Similarly, terrain can dynamically change hands, as settlements can be fought over and contested by other players.
Though the game suffered a rough critical reception at launch, it did command the attention of the MMO community for a good while. It had a healthy player base in terms of size and was undoubtedly a commercial success. To this day, New World's current player count on Steam sits at nearly 50,000 (as of 2:00 p.m. EST) with a monthly average of over 25,000. New World was Amazon's first venture into gaming in a first-party capacity, being developed by a subsidiary team known as Amazon Games Orange County.
Amazon has several other studios under its development division, including teams in San Diego, Montreal, and Seattle. However, their future in gaming development is currently unclear. Besides the western publishing of Korean MMO Lost Ark, which had launched in South Korea back in 2019, Amazon has not published any game this year, and there are seemingly no plans to do so. It's unknown what their first-party teams are working on, if anything at all. The only recent announcement of relevance was a collaboration with an indie studio called Disruptive Games, to develop an "online multiplayer action-adventure game based on a new IP."
One of the most interesting statistics revealed by New World's post is the Twitch streaming figure. At 12.4 billion minutes, or slightly over 200 million hours, it means that more than a third of the game's total playing time has been streamed on Twitch. This goes to show the undeniable importance of community interaction in a game so dependent on socialization. However, it also suggests that only a small fraction of players has stayed over time, and these very avid players, which include Twitch streamers, have largely attributed to the total playing time hours.