Amazon's efforts in games haven't been me with much positivity, save for the publisher's most recent project in New World. Early previews of Amazon Games' New World MMO were largely positive, citing the game's highly customizable classes and relatively deep combat. The fantasy MMO hasn't released to the public just yet, but that will change soon with the game's public test in August. Some early previewers have discovered a serious performance issue that can potentially brick Nvidia's high-end GPUs (RTX 3090s, to be specific) due to overheating graphics cards. Even if the problem may only require a minor fix before the full release, this issue is still huge.
Unfortunately, thanks to this most recent situation with New World's GPU allocation and performance issues, Amazon Games can't seem to catch a break. Even if this last issue is less drastic compared to previous Amazon-published games, it's yet another blemish in the company's efforts in publishing games. Before New World's performance issues, nearly every previous Amazon Games title has released to middling/poor reception previously. Then, for Amazon's latest game to be widely known as problematic (to the point of literally killing a player's graphics card), New World's launch could suffer a similar fate to every Amazon-published game before it.
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At least for New World, this issue with GPU resource allocation seems to have an easy temporary fix. That being said, that is absolutely no excuse for a AAA game to release (even in closed beta) with an issue capable of catastrophic hardware failure. Amazon has since issued a statement meant to reassure players that the current New World closed beta is "safe to play," which is a concerning statement to make even out of context. For now, players of New World who want to avoid the issue altogether need to make sure they disable the "Max Frame Rate" option in Nvidia Control Panel, and then set a maximum FPS within the game's settings as well.
For players that have already experienced the issue in-game, or even had the worst-case scenario of a fried GPU, now couldn't be a worse time for this kind of issue to crop up. The PC market has become incredibly volatile and expensive since the pandemic started, and has remained so throughout 2021 as well. Among other industries, computer technology is suffering significantly from the worldwide chip shortage. Having to source another high-end Nvidia GPU would be incredibly difficult. The fact that a game is capable of bypassing fail safes to cause such hardware damage is practically unheard of, and only hurts Amazon's reputation further as a games publisher.
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Even if New World's closed beta and full release are received relatively well, Amazon Games will still need to deal with the fallout from this problem. As if Amazon needed another reason for players not to check out its games, possible hardware damage caused by a game is unacceptable. It's not like previous Amazon Games' titles like The Grand Tour Game, Crucible, or Breakaway, which either had abysmal/unexciting marketing and support, received negative reviews, or a mixture of both. Crucible, a live service multiplayer action game, was cancelled around five months after the game's launch. Grand Tour received poor reviews, and Breakaway was cancelled pre-release.
In several cases, developers of the aforementioned games moved on to work on New World as well, the latest upcoming release from Amazon Games. Prior to this recent hardware issue on PC, by all accounts, the New World MMO was received particularly well by critics during preview events. Of course, this August will be the first time the public will be able to participate in playing New World, so fan reception could be a key indicator of the game's potential as well. That being said, the unfortunate circumstances of this hardware issue are not doing New World any favors, especially considering the history of lackluster releases from Amazon Games.
New World's issues contributing to legitimate hardware failure is an ill-fated turn of events for a game that can (and still could) serve as Amazon's potential comeback in the games industry. That being said, this short-term issue is by no means definitive proof that Amazon Games is doomed to fail, far from it. It's just a matter of Amazon being able to circumvent any semblance of "bad press" from this Nvidia GPU issue, whether that's through heavy marketing or the emphasis of New World's launch reviews. Either way, Amazon Games continues to be dug into an even deeper hole, and is going to need to make a serious comeback for New World to succeed.
New World releases on August 31, 2021, on PC.