One tracking website showed over 700,000 people were playing at 1800 GMT (2am in Malaysia), making “New World” the most popular game at that moment, according to the website Steam DB.

“New World” takes place on the imaginary island of Aeternum, which players from a civilisation akin to the mid-18th century West must conquer.

The title is a so-called MMO or Massively Multiplayer Online game that can bring together thousands of players and sells for US$40 (RM167).

On the Amazon-owned video platform Twitch, which is popular with gamers, about 900,000 people were watching videos of the new game.

This is not Amazon’s first foray in the gaming world – in early 2019 it launched “The Grand Tour Game” but withdrew it last year after a poor reception from critics and players.

By October, Amazon had also discontinued its game “Crucible”, which had only been released a few months earlier in May.

The New York Times says Amazon has already spent several hundred million dollars in the development of video games, without real success until yesterday.

“New World” has to be “our breakthrough game – there’s no doubt about it”, Christoph Hartmann, vice-president of Amazon Games, told the paper.

Publishing aside, Amazon has been active in the gaming industry for several years. It bought Twitch in 2014 and last year launched Luna, a subscription-based online video game platform.