New World will join the graveyard of defunct MMOs when it goes offline in 2027
New World, the only Amazon game that stuck around long enough to find a steady amount of players, is now being ushered toward the graveyard with all the other games the ecommerce megacorp has shut down for good. And now we have the date for its final day: January 31, 2027.
The game has now been delisted from Steam and every platform you could buy it on, and will only be playable by anyone who already owns it. Amazon says in a post about the news that the only way to refund the game is to contact the customer service of the platform you bought it on. There will be no refunds for Marks of Fortune, the MMO's premium currency.
The MMO will remain playable for the next year until the servers shut down, but there won't be any future updates other than bug fixes and performance updates. While the game remains in stasis, its Nighthaven season will continue all the way until the end.
"We want to thank the players for your dedication and passion," the post reads. "We are grateful for the time spent crafting the world of Aeternum with you. Together we built something special. While we are saddened to say goodbye, we're honored that we were able to share so much with the community."
New World's end was preceded by a massive round of layoffs in October that slashed around 14,000 jobs at Amazon. It said they were part of "strategic changes" at the company and that it would halt "a significant amount" of first-party game development, particularly around MMOs. That same day, Amazon announced that it was "no longer sustainable to continue supporting [New World] with new content updates," and that its Nighthaven update would be its last.
Developers on the game snuck a goodbye letter into the update, which was pointed out by one of the senior game designers after it dropped.
It would be hard to call New World an explosive success, but it certainly wasn't a flop. Although the MMO never reached Final Fantasy 14 or World of Warcraft levels, it did bounce between 50,000 and 60,000 concurrent players on Steam after it was released. That's quite a lot for a newer MMO in an age where MMOs don't really catch on like it used to. Star Wars: The Old Republic hovers around 5,000 concurrent players on Steam, but whatever it's doing must be enough for EA to keep it around. I can only imagine Amazon had absurdly high expectations for it after watching it bring in more than a million players on release.
Even though New World still has a year of life left, I will be curious to see if anyone manages to find a way to spin up private servers of it. Earlier this week, EA's live service shooter Anthem shut down, and its project lead suggested that there's a version of the game out there that could be turned into a private server if someone were to get their hands on it.
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