Amazon Game Studios looks to be getting out of the MMO business entirely, handing Western operations of Throne and Liberty and Lost Ark back to their respective developers.
In two blog posts, Amazon Game Studios outlined its plans to transition both games to their South Korean creators in the coming months. For Throne and Liberty, that transition will happen in Q4 2026 as NC (formerly NCSoft) takes over, while Lost Ark’s transition will happen in early 2027 and see Smilegate fully take the reins.
While Amazon didn’t develop the two games directly, it did publish both titles and handled live-service operations and customer support in the West. Both free-to-play games found success at launch (Lost Ark in particular saw huge numbers on Steam), but have seen player counts dwindle over time.
It doesn’t sound like much will change in the near term. Both games will likely experience some downtime as Amazon hands over the keys, but the two games will each continue to operate in the West. Most player data and character progress made in the two games will also carry forward. In the case of Throne and Liberty, cross-progression will no longer work between Steam and consoles after the transition.
For those who don’t want to hand over all of their data, there will be an option to opt out of the transition. Doing so naturally means characters, items, and other progress won’t be transferred, and players will essentially need to start again from scratch. For everyone else, the data transfer will essentially be seamless, with no action needed on the part of players aside from needing to accept a new terms of service upon logging in for the first time.
Amazon just a few years ago looked to be establishing itself as a major player in the MMO space. It released its own MMO, New World, in 2021 to huge initial numbers on Steam, even if it didn’t hold on to that momentum for long. It then followed up that success in 2022 by publishing and operating Lost Ark in the West, with Throne and Liberty following a similar playbook in 2024. There were also plans for Amazon to publish the anime MMO Blue Protocol, though the game’s Western release was instead canceled entirely.
Flash forward to now and the house of Bezos has completely washed its hands of the genre. Amazon announced earlier this year that New World’s servers will go offline in early 2027, following a console release in 2024 and a string of well-received updates that had players optimistic for the future prior to the shutdown announcement. The creators of New World were also working on a Lord of the Rings MMO, only for that to be reportedly canceled amidst layoffs at Amazon Game Studios.
