Amazon Is Walking Away From the MMO Business — Here's What Happens to the Games and Their Players
Amazon Game Studios is handing off its last two major MMOs and shutting down the one it built itself, effectively exiting the massively multiplayer online games business it entered less than five years ago.
The moves, announced on 12 August 2026, span three titles. Western operations of Throne and Liberty — a free-to-play fantasy MMO that Amazon began publishing in 2024 — will transfer to NC (formerly NCSoft) in the fourth quarter of 2026. Western operations of Lost Ark, which Amazon has published since 2022, will go to its developer, Smilegate, in early 2027. And New World, the MMO Amazon developed in-house, will have its servers taken offline in early 2027. (GameSpot)
Amazon's role for both Throne and Liberty and Lost Ark was that of a Western publisher: it handled live-service updates — the ongoing patches, seasons and events that keep an online game running after launch — along with customer support and storefront operations outside the games' home markets in South Korea. Both titles launched to strong player numbers before seeing those counts decline over time, according to GameSpot.
A Western release of the anime-styled MMO Blue Protocol, which Amazon had also planned to publish, was cancelled outright — narrowing the company's publishing slate to zero. (GameSpot)
For most players, the transitions are designed to be quiet. Characters, progression, inventory, platform access and game data will carry forward to the new operators without any action required, unless a player chooses to opt out. (Throne and Liberty, Lost Ark) Opting out means the opposite: characters, items and progress will not be transferred, and the player effectively leaves the game behind.
Throne and Liberty players will need to accept new Terms of Service from NC and complete any required account-activation steps to keep playing after the handover. The game's regions and realms — covering the Americas, Europe, Asia and Oceania — will remain as they are, with no server consolidation. Cross-play between Steam, PlayStation and Xbox will also stay the same. NC's subsidiary FirstSpark Games will directly operate the game in the West. (Throne and Liberty)
One thing that will break: cross-progression between Steam and consoles for Throne and Liberty will stop working after the transition. Players who switch between a PC and a console while playing the same character will lose that ability. (GameSpot)
For Lost Ark, which runs on Steam only, the changes are narrower. The publisher, customer-support provider, in-game store operator, refund policy and Terms of Service will change hands to Smilegate. Nearly all player data transfers — progression, wallet balances, entitlements and even preset names for gear and skills. The one exception is in-game mail, which will not carry over. (Lost Ark)
Amazon's MMO publishing run was brief but busy. Lost Ark arrived in the West in 2022; Throne and Liberty followed in 2024. Both were South Korean-developed games that Amazon adapted, localised and ran for Western audiences. New World, by contrast, was built from scratch inside Amazon Game Studios — and will be the one that simply turns off.
For fans, the practical question is narrow: accept the new terms, or opt out and walk away. The games will continue. They will just do so under different names on the publisher line.
