If anyone wants to know why the plug has been pulled on this game, just look at this thread. Before today and posts about it's death, the last posts were almost three years ago both, albeit in different ways, commenting on the lack of players.
It's been a corpse for years much like Amazon Game Studios itself.
Looking at thread on kwifarms is not a good mirror of reality. There are many popular games with dead threads on here. The thing is New World had signs of turning ship around. Last 2 months it was shilled to oblivion outside of kiwifarms and honestly the update looked pretty cool. For few weeks it apparently had huge issues with queues. Too many people wanted to play it. That' why it's so surprising to many people.
Looking at thread on kwifarms is not a good mirror of reality. There are many popular games with dead threads on here. The thing is New World had signs of turning ship around. Last 2 months it was shilled to oblivion outside of kiwifarms and honestly the update looked pretty cool. For few weeks it apparently had huge issues with queues. Too many people wanted to play it. That' why it's so surprising to many people.
Do take into account, Amazon also just cut a shitload of jobs recently. Something like tens of thousands in admin positions, if I'm remembering correctly? Not a huge number for a company that has a nigh-infinite capital to throw around, but even such an eldritch beast will start to wonder where all of its blood is going after a while.
Point is, the devs might've just gotten swept up in the wave due to not making a fuckzillion dollars every quarter.