‘New World’ MMO becomes one of Steam’s top-selling games of 2021 less than three months after its official launch

Amazon’s latest AAA game was released in late September after suffering several delays. But even though its official launch was pushed to the latter part of 2021, it still entered several “Best of 2021” lists on Steam, proving how popular the new massively multiplayer online game has been less than three months since its release.

Steam released several “Best of 2021” lists recently to recognize the games that performed well and were received well by its users throughout the year. Considering the anticipation toward “New World” in the previous months, it was not surprising that the game has been named one of the top-selling titles on Steam this year.

The PC digital storefront does not say which place “New World” is in for this category. There is also no specific data provided to explain why it made the list. But Steam noted that its top-selling games of 2021 are composed of the platform’s top 100 games with the highest gross revenue.

Data from third-party trackers might provide more context, though. PlayTracker (via SteamDB) estimates that there are 2 to 2.1 million players that own a copy of “New World.” PlayTracker says its Insight service is “90% certain that estimates for this game are accurate within a 10% interval (+- 0.2M).” Despite the potential discrepancy, it is still a high number for a game that is an all-new IP and was only released less than three months ago.

Meanwhile, many games included in the top-selling list for 2021 use a free-to-play business model, so their inclusion in the list is not surprising. Joining “New World” in this list are “PUBG,” “Apex Legends,” “CS:GO,” and “Dota 2.”

“New World” is also one of the few recently released games that entered Steam’s list of most played titles in 2021, which is composed of games that had more than 200,000 peak players. A few days after its launch, “New World” recorded its all-time peak players with 913,634 concurrent players on Sept. 30 (UTC).

With these achievements, it should not come as a shock that Steam also named “New World” one of its best new releases of 2021. And new fans now have a chance to purchase the game at a 25 percent discount during Steam’s holiday sale.