New World Aeternum? More Like New World Temporalis

Twenty-four hours ago, I wouldn't have bet a red cent on my next post here being about New World.

It's true I had been thinking about playing again. The latest update, Nighthaven, looks very appealing and  the previous expansion, Rise of the Angry Earth, which I never bought, just went free to play, so there's a great deal of content I've never seen. The game was reportedly undergoing a bit of a renaissance thanks to all of that and it's always interesting to see an MMORPG in the throes of a surge.

Still, it didn't feel like quite the right time to go back, not for me anyway. I'd uninstalled New World a few months ago because I was running short of storage and space hasn't gotten any bigger since then. I was loathe to give up another 60GB for a game I might not even play. 

And then my PC broke and I moved back to this much older one I'm using now, on which New World probably wouldn't run very well, if it even ran at all. So I pushed the idea to the back of the list, thinking maybe I'd take a look when I got a new machine. 

It's not like there was any hurry, after all. New World wasn't going anywhere. It was on the up, wasn't it? If Amazon hadn't canned it when it was barely scraping by, they'd hardly bail on it when it was picking up traction, would they?

So it was a bit of a surprise, to say the least, when this popped up in Feedly yesterday. Shortly followed by this. 

For anyone that can't be bothered to click through, the first of those links says that Amazon is getting out of the first-party gaming business in general, specifically withdrawing from MMOs. The second confirms that Nighthaven will be the final content release for New World, which will henceforth immediately enter maintenance mode.

It hasn't been officially confirmed yet but you can almost certainly also say goodbye to the in-development MMO based on the Lord of the Rings IP that Amazon was making. Not the first game that was being made in China. That got cancelled a while ago. The second iteration, the one they were supposedly developing in the USA. Since the studios that were working on it don't exist any longer, it's a safe bet that game is gone, too.

Just for clarity, Amazon hasn't (Yet.) pulled out of the games market completely. It's still committed to running Lost Ark and Throne and Liberty in the West, although if I had to guess I'd say that might only last as long as it takes for whatever contractual obligations they might be under to expire. I suspect the company no longer wants anything to do with making and running games at all.

I'm surprised only because I wan't expecting it right now but I can't say I'm surprised it's happening at all.  Amazon was never convincing as a games developer.

The company, like a lot of others that have subsequently pulled away, got into the games market a time when everyone wanted to be in that space. There was a huge boom in gaming during the pandemic and it looked like gaming was potentially going to be the biggest entertainment medium of the next decade if not the rest of the century.

Then several things happened. Interest in gaming generally slipped as people got out of the house and back to the lives they used to have before they got locked down. It also became apparent that what the mainstream audience really wanted were easier, simpler, less challenging games. Meanwhile, Amazon completed development on several games and they were all either disasters or disappointments, New World included. Then finally AI came along and stole everyone's lunch money.

Looked at from a non-gaming perspective, the  question isn't so much "Why would they quit now, when things seem to be looking up?" as "What the hell did they think they were doing messing around with games in the first place and why didn't they get out years ago? It was always obvious they weren't getting anywhere."

It's hard to imagine that all of Amazon's gaming portfolio put together, including not just their first and third party MMOs but also Prime Gaming and Luna, contribute anything very significant to the vast megacorps' bottom line. I asked Gemini to figure out "what percentage of Amazon's overall turnover comes from their gaming operations, including Luna?" and this is what it told me:

"Based on Amazon's 2024 financial reports and available industry data, the revenue from its gaming operations—including Luna, Prime Gaming, and Amazon Games—is significantly less than 1% of the company's overall turnover

. Amazon's gaming sector is relatively small and unprofitable compared to its other business segments, particularly Amazon Web Services (AWS) and its North American e-commerce operations. 

Amazon's total turnover and gaming revenue (2024)

• Total Revenue: For fiscal year 2024, Amazon reported a total revenue of $638 billion.
• Gaming Revenue: In contrast, the company's video game division generated an estimated annual revenue of $549.9 million in 2024. Luna is included within this revenue stream but does not report its figures separately. 

Calculation

Using the figures from 2024, Amazon's gaming revenue accounts for approximately 0.09% of its total turnover."

I'm not vouching for Gemini's accuracy but that's very much in line with what I would have expected so I'll take it.

Of course, none of this has anything at all to do with whether the games are any good. The only conceivable way that would factor in to any decision would be if they were prestige projects that added luster to the company, either with the public or within the corporate ecosphere.

 Like Hollywood movies that no-one goes to see but which win big at the Oscars, every media and entertainment business can afford to carry a few critical darlings for the buzz they offer and for the self-aggrandizement that comes from being associated with them. New World does not add to Amazon's luster. It did, briefly, when it broke sales records on launch but very quickly all the stories in the media were about the gaffes AGS was making and the cascading numbers, which showed players leaving by the hundreds of thousands. 

New World very quickly developed a reputation as a buggy mess of a game, played by almost no-one and operated by barely competent developers, amateurs who seemed to create two new bugs for every old one they fixed. Far from being a feather in Amazon's cap it turned the gaming division into something not far off being a laughing stock.

And yet Amazon stuck with it, trying to shore it up and eventually reshape it into a new game, New World Aeternum, just so it could have a second chance at making a first impression, this time on console. The move was seen by some, even at the time, as a Hail Mary pass for the game but it looked to have landed. After a fashion. 

Player numbers stabilized to an extent. Some of the newer content was relatively warmly received. The whole thing began to look a little less like a clown show. With the recent release of Nighthaven it seemed as if the game might genuinely have a future.

It did not. It does not. It's apparent now that the reason AGS were so surprisingly generous, not only giving away the expansion-sized Nighthaven update for free but throwing in the actual paid expansion Rise of the Angry Earth as a bonus, was that they were done with the whole thing. 

Presumably it all happened quite quickly. I don't imagine anyone said "Hey, we're shutting the studio in a few months and putting the game on life support. How about we go out with a bang?" I imagine until pretty recently the devs working on Nighthaven assumed the intention was to make money on it and if that worked, there'd be further expansions down the line. 

That won't be happening. The game is officially entering maintenance mode. In fact, it already has. There will be no further development and no new content. 

Amazon have undertaken to keep the servers on "through 2026" although I would point out that the exact form of words used in the statement is less definitive than that makes it sound. What they've actually said is that it's their "intention" to do so and we all know what good intentions are worth.

They've also said they'll give "a minimum of six months’ notice" before shutting down the servers so the best we can say for certain right now is that we'll be able to play New World until next April. 

I imagine it'll run on a little longer than that. They probably will let it have another year, provided it doesn't give anyone any trouble. On the same logic that it wasn't making them any meaningful amount of money or giving them any useful publicity, maintenance mode is going to represent an insignificant cost, while closing the servers sooner than they suggested they would could lead to some negative press. Easier just to leave the servers switched on and forget about them until everyone else has, too.

I thought when I started this post that I'd talk about my history with the game, which goes back to the earliest alphas, but this has already run on long enough. I'll leave what I think about the game as a game for then, should I ever get around to writing it. 

For now, I'll just say I've always liked New World. It's been on my permanent list of "games I might go back to some day" for years now.  As I said at the top, I'd been thinking about doing just that recently. The news that it may not be around for much longer and that what's there now is all that there's ever going to be does nothing to change my mind.

Or, actually, no, it makes it quite a lot more likely I will go back and sooner rather than later. I'm going to wait until I replace this PC but once I do, I'll almost certainly re-install New World, including all the content I've never seen, and give it another go. 

Given that I've always played the game as if it was a solo RPG, it makes no difference to me how many other people are playing, too. If maintenance mode leads to ghost servers, it won't much matter for anything I'm likely to be doing. 

As for there being no new content, that's not going to be a problem until I've finished what's already there, which I probably was never likely to do anyway. It's not like I finished everything in the original game, even when I was playing daily for months.

Maintenance mode can be a comfortable, welcoming place, too. The only people around are there because it's a game they really like. There aren't any irritating changes to mechanics or systems to assimilate. You can be assured the experience you expected, and for which you logged in, will be the experience you'll get. For some players, it's a better deal than Live Service.

The problem always is whether it will last. 

It can. Look at Guild Wars. Look at FFXI.  Two games that have been in Maintenance Mode for many years. Both still have players. Both have a good reputation. If Amazon could replicate those experiences for New World players, Maintenance Mode wouldn't be too bad at all.

They won't, of course. They'll run  the game on for just so long as they think they can get away with without a sunset damaging the company, either commercially or reputationally, and then they'll switch the servers off. Amazon isn't Square Enix. It's not even ArenaNet. 

In fact, let's be clear about it: Amazon is not a gaming company. It never was.