Amazon Games is winding down support for New World: Aeternum amid layoffs in the division and even deeper job cuts across its parent company. The game debuted on PC in 2021 and it landed on PS5 and Xbox Series X/S just over a year ago.
“After four years of steady content updates and a major new console release, we’ve reached a point where it is no longer sustainable to continue supporting the game with new content updates,” Amazon Games wrote in a blog post. “The recently launched Season 10 and Nighthaven update will serve as the final content release for New World on PC and consoles. It is only after much consideration that we’ve reached this decision.”
Players will still be able to buy New World for now, and it will remain available to PlayStation Plus subscribers on the Extra and Premium tiers “until further notice.” Amazon is making this month’s Nighthaven expansion available to everyone for free too.
The company said it will keep the game’s servers up and running through 2026, “allowing our community time to continue their adventures in Aeternum.” In terms of how long fans will be able to keep playing the game, Amazon said it will provide more details about “what to expect in the coming months.” It pledged to “provide a minimum of six months’ notice before making any changes that impact your ability to play New World: Aeternum.”
According to Bloomberg, Amazon told staff in a memo this week that, as part of widespread layoffs, it would dial back work on big-budget games, especially MMOs — a category that New World falls under. Updates for Throne and Liberty and Lost Ark — MMOS that Amazon publishes but are developed externally — will continue, the company confirmed to MassivelyOP.
Amazon did not comment on the status of a Lord of the Rings MMO that’s been in the works for a while. However, according to Eurogamer, a former Amazon senior gameplay engineer wrote in a since-deleted LinkedIn post that they were laid off “alongside my incredibly talented peers on New World and our fledgling Lord of the Rings game (y’all would have loved it).”
Amazon Games vice president Christoph Hartmann told me last year that Amazon started its big push into games with MMOs because it saw an opportunity. At the time, there weren’t too many titles in that genre popping up. However, he noted that “we’re evolving out of the MMOs” into other genres, hinting then that the division was changing focus. (Amazon’s first AAA game, the free-to-play shooter Crucible, didn’t last long after its debut in 2020.)
New World is still a popular game. It got off to a blistering start, with a peak concurrent player count of 914,000 on Steam. This past weekend, it at one point had nearly 50,000 concurrent players on that platform. It was also one of the highest grossing games on Steam in 2021.
And yet it seems that Amazon’s games division will now focus more on Luna, the cloud service for which it rolled out an overhaul just last week. It reportedly plans to keep releasing “casual and AI-focused games” for Luna, such as Courtroom Chaos: Starring Snoop Dogg, which puts an AI-generated version of the rapper in a Judge Judy-type role for court case-style debates between players. Amazon’s most recent game for PC and consoles is King of Meat, a co-op dungeon-building platformer that has so far reached a peak Steam concurrent player count of just 253.
Update, October 30 11:02AM ET: Updated with details about the Lord of the Rings game’s possible cancellation.
