The story of the closure of the flagship MMORPG New World: Aeternum from Amazon Games received an unexpected continuation. After the authors confirmed the closure of servers at the end of January 2027, the situation intervened Alistair McFarlane, Director of Operations at Facepunch Studios. The head of the team behind the survival simulator Rust has publicly offered Amazon a $25 million deal to buy the project and save it from certain death.
As McFarlane noted on his X account, games shouldn’t disappear without a trace just because a corporation decides to stop supporting them. The plan to save New World is to put the reins in the hands of the players themselves. If the deal goes through, Facepunch plans to release tools to run public user servers. This approach will allow fans to independently maintain life in the world of Aeternum for an unlimited time, without looking at official equipment shutdown schedules.
The initiative has already been supported by other prominent industry representatives. Simon Collins-Laflamme, the creator of the acclaimed Hytale, even offered his colleagues from Facepunch his help and advice on the issue of buying out shuttered game projects. This enthusiasm on the part of major developers is due to growing dissatisfaction in the community due to the trend towards the destruction of online games, which become completely unavailable immediately after the official closure.
At the moment, Amazon Games has not commented on this proposal. An amount of $25 million may seem significant for a game with a falling online market, but for a giant like Amazon it is a drop in the bucket, and the issue here is more about reputation and legal subtleties. In the meantime, the official plan remains the same: New World has already been removed from sale, and the in-game store will close in July of this year. If MacFarlane fails to reach an agreement with the publisher, the world of the game will finally plunge into darkness on January 31, 2027.
