SYSTEM Cited by 1 source
New World — Amazon Games¶
Overview¶
Amazon Games' New World is a seamless MMORPG (launched 2021) that became the 5th-highest concurrent-user game in Steam history with >900,000 concurrent users in its opening weekend. The architecture is notable for running at 30 Hz simulation frequency (≈6× the ~5 Hz of traditional MMOs), 2,500 players per seamless world, 7,000+ AI entities per server set, and hundreds of thousands of objects — all backed by AWS infrastructure with DynamoDB handling ~800,000 writes every 30 seconds for game-state persistence. Source: AWS Games blog — The Unique Architecture behind Amazon Games' Seamless MMO New World, summarized in sources/2022-07-11-highscalability-stuff-the-internet-says-on-scalability-for-july-11th-2022.
Scale snapshot¶
| Metric | Value |
|---|---|
| Peak concurrent users (opening weekend) | >900,000 |
| Players per seamless world | 2,500 |
| AI entities per server set | 7,000+ |
| Simulation frequency | 30 Hz |
| Traditional MMO frequency (comparison) | ~5 Hz |
| DynamoDB writes | ~800,000 / 30 seconds |
| State-change rate | millions / second |
Architecture thesis: scale-out over scale-up¶
"In the old world, if things needed to scale up, you bought bigger hardware."
New World instead distributes the simulation across many hub-instance servers spread across AWS Regions, passing player state between hubs as players traverse the world — a geographic sharding of the simulation rather than a server-pool partition. Each hub is a node in a distributed simulation mesh; player state flows across mesh boundaries as players move.
Why this matters¶
- 30 Hz seamless world. Traditional MMOs simulate at ~5 Hz and zone the world (loading screens between zones). New World targets a 6× higher simulation frequency and zero zoning. Compute density must be split across many hubs to meet the 30 Hz budget at 2,500-player density.
- Per-player state is heavy. Each player + AI entity emits many state changes per tick; 800K DynamoDB writes every 30 seconds implies ~27K writes/sec per world pair averaged out, at peak.
AWS stack¶
- Amazon EC2 — hub-instance compute; the simulation mesh.
- Amazon DynamoDB — persistent game state (writes of player position, inventory, world state).
- AWS Lambda — serverless event handling for known core gameplay loops; backend event processing.
- Multiple AWS Regions — hubs distributed globally; per-Region simulation meshes.
Related¶
- systems/dynamodb — the write-heavy state substrate.
- systems/aws-lambda — backend event handling.
- companies/aws — the infrastructure provider (and owner of Amazon Games).
- sources/2022-07-11-highscalability-stuff-the-internet-says-on-scalability-for-july-11th-2022.
- companies/highscalability.