Amazon Games has confirmed the official servers for New World: Aeternum will be taken offline in January 2027, unequivocally marking the end for an ambitious MMORPG. In a line with this decision, the title has been delisted from all digital storefronts. While the game is henceforth unable to be purchased by new players, those who already own it are still able to access the servers and the mystical island of Aeternum until the official end of operation.
Released in September 2021, New World came with massive expectations and straddled the gaming landscape for a brief while with its peak concurrent player counts rivaling even that of the biggest titans in the industry. After several cancellations of high-profile games, this was Amazon’s first massive success in the gaming world. It was the game that rekindled interest in the sandbox MMO genre. Over the course of its existence, however, this journey was marred by numerous instances of technical difficulty, including economy-breaking bugs that seemed persistent and a difficult endgame loop that could not hold a player base over the longer term.
New World: Aeternum was to be a fresh slate for the IP: action-oriented, console-friendly approaches were adopted to widen appeal. But despite trying to simplify gameplay and embark on some noteworthy content distributions, the necessary impetus to keep an undertaking of this scale alive has sadly ground to a halt. Since Amazon has two years to shutter the game-a very generous timeline in an industry where most online titles go dark with little more than a few months’ notice-it could also encourage other game developers to start doing the same.
As the community prepares for the last stretch, much depends on how the developers will spend the next two years. Many old-timers find themselves wishing for some sort of closure, preferably a closing event that pulls together many of the loose lore threads associated with the Eternal Isle. For those who were in the communities that formed within the game’s factions, it is something of a grim day. It does, however, signify a distinct shift in the general strategy of Amazon Games as they move toward their upcoming projects, including the much-rumored Lord of the Rings MMO.
