Amazon Games was hit with "significant" layoffs today, part of the massive 14,000 job cuts announced by Amazon but also reflecting "strategic changes" at the company, including "the difficult decision to halt a significant amount of our first-party AAA game development work—specifically around MMOs." As it turns out, that includes the MMO New World: Aeternum, which will receive no further content updates and could be gone completely by the end of 2026.
"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," today's update states.
This comes as a genuine surprise to me—a shock, really. New World wasn't a huge hit by any means but seemed a reasonably successful mid-tier MMO, which quite frankly is about as good as Amazon Games has managed. Its concurrent player count ebbed and flowed, but the peaks of 50,000 and 60,000 players suggests to me that the players are there—the failure is in keeping them engaged.
But Amazon only committed to keeping the New World servers "live through 2026," and the likelihood of it surviving beyond that, especially given the self-fulfilling swirl of declining player counts, is very slim. So I can see continuing to bang around in the game with your online pals as the sun slowly goes down, absolutely—but why would anyone put money into an MMO with no future?
More details on how exactly the plug will be pulled will be shared "in the coming months," but Amazon promised "provide a minimum of six months’ notice before making any changes that impact your ability to play New World: Aeternum."
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