Amazon Insists New World MMO Is Safe To Play Amid Reports Of More Dead GPUs
Amazon's recently-released game New World is cracking open pent-up MMORPG demand to become a massive hit. At the time of this publication, it's currently the number-one most-played game on Steam. That's in spite of some bad press; we reported last week on stories of the released game murdering folks' hardware, just like back in the beta.
At that time, Amazon patched the game and promised to further investigate the problem, even though it only affected a handful of users. EVGA replaced gamers' cards, and said that it had identified the problem: poor soldering on power-thirsty GPUs, an issue that certainly could affect more than just its own parts.
Now, a week after release, New World is still popping GPUs, and some fans are understandably frustrated. The buzz on the issue has grown to the point that Amazon issued a statement to hardwareluxx.de. In the statement, Amazon notes it has "extensively investigated" the game and can't find any particular behavior that would cause the problem. (News flash: corporation investigates itself, finds no fault.) The statement also calls back to EVGA's announcement that it had found the problem, then goes on to say that the game is safe to play, and that users suffering hardware failures should contact their GPU vendor.
Source: Steamcharts
It's important to keep the situation in proper context, as there are less than one-hundred confirmed reports of GPUs getting smoked by New World, and right now on this Thursday afternoon, there are some 576,352 players online. If it really were a fault of the game, we'd surely be seeing a lot more failures. EVGA's explanation of shoddy soldering makes sense, especially given the unprecedented transient load from Nvidia's Ampere GPUs.
Given the rarity of these incidents, Amazon is probably correct that New World is safe to play. Of course, there's also the argument that if you do in fact have one of the afflicted graphics cards, it might be better to find out now than after the warranty runs out. If you're still feeling trepidation over the safety of your currently-extraordinarily-precious graphics card, why not try a different game?
