Among the three debut titles that Amazon Game Studios announced in 2016, New World: Aeternum seemed like the most successful. Breakaway and Crucible flopped hard, but New World was an incredible success, for a brief period at least. At launch in 2021, it boasted upwards of 900,000 concurrent players on Steam, and united some of the top content creators on Youtube and Twitch to share their experiences with the MMORPG. But New World generally wasn’t lauded as anything groundbreaking, and towards the beginning of its lifetime players and critics alike gave it relatively modest reviews. And within a year, the playerbase dwindled down to a fraction what it once was, hovering between 20k and 40k. As time went on, those numbers dropped even further–excepting the spikes around the drop of a new update or free weekend–and today, the developers confirmed that the game will be delisted and its servers fully shut off by January 31st, 2027.

New World: Aeternum will officially be taken offline from all platforms on January 31, 2027.

Learn more: https://t.co/FK9O07Hm0F pic.twitter.com/UBXHaetLSz

— New World: Aeternum (@playnewworld) January 15, 2026

All games eventually meet their end, however for as big of a project as New World was, especially considering the lifetime of other MMOs, this seems like a premature ending. Warframe, Runescape, Warthunder, Destiny 2, and Elder Scrolls Online were all released quite a while ago, and even despite the gripes their communities have with them, they still rake in hundreds of thousands of players to this day. Amazon Game Studios hasn’t detailed specifically why they are taking their game offline other than that it wasn’t “sustainable” for them to continue work after Season 10. This was asserted by the developers last year after a wave of layoffs in their parent company due to redundancies caused by AI, so perhaps the shut-down isn’t completely out of the blue. Regardless of whatever reason New World is coming to meet its end, it’s a huge loss for the small community of players who still play the game. Because unlike many titles, once the servers go offline for an MMO, it is usually erased from existence. There can’t really be community servers for a game of that size, and indeed for New World, it will be completely inaccessible on any platform around this time next year. And in the FAQ of the shut-down announcement, the developers confirm that there will be no refunds for the game or any of its purchasable content. Ouch.