Back in October, there was a particularly provocative thread on the MMORPG subreddit. I know, that’s just a day that ends in Y. And it was apparently bad enough that the mods deleted it, so I know I wasn’t alone in taking notice. Essentially, the poster argued that “the sudden surge in activity about New World is fake” and urged players, “Don’t buy into it.”
Now, full disclosure, in 2021 when New World first launched, I was extremely skeptical about its marketing. I explicitly argued that Amazon was trying to brute-force the genre by making the game the only thing you saw anywhere – every website, every Twitch stream, every YouTube channel, every social media post. It didn’t work, note.
But now, some folks would have us believe that a studio that apparently couldn’t budget for professional voice work is paying for widespread astroturfing on the aging Reddit platform. This is extra eye-rolly now given the context that New World has been hit by major Amazon layoffs just this week and is going into permanent maintenance mode because, the studio says, it wasn’t sustainable. But somehow thee astroturf conspiracy was easier to believe than that thousands of people returned to New World because it just put out a patch a lot of people wanted with a new Halloween-themed zone right before Halloween and gave away a PC expansion too.
To be fair, every time someone posts about Project Gorgon, it dissolves into cries about paid posts too, so most days these things just look like “everyone who likes things I don’t like is fake.” (This is exactly how the sub gets the reputation for being negative; it shouts down anything positive. It’s exhausting.)
I want to consider the thesis more broadly. Do you believe MMORPG studios astroturf or fake interest in their games? How exactly are they doing it, according to you?
Every morning, the Massively Overpowered writers team up with mascot Mo to ask MMORPG players pointed questions about the massively multiplayer online roleplaying genre. Grab a mug of your preferred beverage and take a stab at answering the question posed in today’s Daily Grind!