Amazon is finishing its retreat from the MMO business. In posts published to players this week, Amazon Game Studios confirmed it will stop running both Lost Ark and Throne and Liberty in the West, handing each game back to its original developer. The move closes the book on Amazon's run as an MMO publisher and operator.
According to the announcements, Throne and Liberty will transition to developer FirstSpark Games and South Korean publisher NC in the fourth quarter of 2026. Lost Ark will move to Smilegate in early 2027. Both statements from Amazon framed the handover as a positive step, saying they were returning each game to the people who made it so their teams' passion for the projects could continue.
The end of a genre pivot
This is the last major piece of a strategy Amazon signaled in October 2025, when it said it had "made the difficult decision to halt a significant amount of our first-party AAA game development work, specifically around MMOs." That shift followed a large round of layoffs and hit Amazon Games Orange County, the studio behind New World. Per VGC, New World stopped receiving new content and is set to go offline permanently on January 31, 2027. A planned Lord of the Rings MMO was also reported to have been cancelled. With Lost Ark and Throne and Liberty now leaving Amazon's hands, the company no longer operates any active MMOs.
As Rock Paper Shotgun notes, Lost Ark and Throne and Liberty were among Amazon's few clear successes in gaming, arguably because they sat at arm's length as published titles rather than in-house builds.
What players stand to lose, and gain
The transitions won't be seamless for everyone. Amazon says most Lost Ark account data will survive: characters, progression, inventory, game data and entitlements, and wallet balances all carry over. But according to Amazon's blog post detailed by Rock Paper Shotgun, chat history and in-game mail will be wiped, along with friends list memos and group names.
Subscriptions are the sticking point. Amazon says active subscriptions will be cancelled with notice before the switch, and it has already stopped selling the 12-month sub. The company is advising players not to buy new long-term subscriptions because "remaining pre-paid time handling is being finalised with Smilegate." The Throne and Liberty move to FirstSpark and NC appears less disruptive, with less data loss expected.
There is an upside for Lost Ark fans. Smilegate says it plans to eventually sync updates between the Korean and global versions, ending the long stretch where Western players watched new raids, classes, and story beats arrive months late. The studio was blunt about the old cadence, saying raid strategies were "often public by the time content arrived, which took much of the joy out of solving a raid for yourselves." Smilegate says it won't force that gap shut in one move, preferring to narrow it "step by step, carefully."
What it means for players
If you play Lost Ark, hold off on any long-term subscription purchases until the Smilegate handoff details firm up in early 2027, and back up anything tied to chat or mail before it disappears. Throne and Liberty players face a smoother Q4 2026 transition to FirstSpark and NC. And if you're still on New World: Aeternum, note the hard shutdown date of January 31, 2027. The good news is that two games with large playerbases are being kept alive rather than switched off, even as Amazon walks away from the genre entirely.