NCSOFT's Guild Wars ranks second with about three million players, followed by Bethesda's Elder Scrolls Online with 2.5 million players.Īnother major issue is that MMOs aren't as popular as other multiplayer genres anymore. World of Warcraft's active users have declined significantly since peaking in 2010, but over five million people still play the 14-year-old game, making it the top MMO in the world. The first major problem is that the top MMOs are incredibly sticky and lock in users for years at a time.

That sounds like a promising mix of Activision Blizzard's ( ATVI -0.73%) World of Warcraft and Epic Games' Fortnite, but Amazon's MMO could still face a tough uphill battle. New World is an MMO sandbox game that lets players build settlements, fight each other, and battle monsters in a supernatural version of colonial America. MMOs, in particular, require more cloud computing horsepower than other kinds of games, since they need to keep entire game worlds online. Lastly, Amazon can run all its games in-house on Amazon Web Services (AWS), the largest cloud infrastructure platform in the world, to reduce each game's hosting expenses.

New mmo for 2018