With the writing already on the wall in red paint after the confirmation that no new content would be coming to New World: Aeternum after the current season, it’s now been confirmed that Amazon’s MMORPG will be shutting down in January 2027. The game is also being delisted today and is no longer available for purchase.
In a farewell message alongside the announcement, the team writes, “We want to thank the players for your dedication and passion. We are grateful for the time spent crafting the world of Aeternum with you. Together we built something special. While we are saddened to say goodbye, we’re honored that we were able to share so much with the community.”
The game server shutdown is scheduled for 31st January 2027, and with the game being delisted from sale today, that means a full year’s notice is being given before service is removed for the game. Additionally, Marks of Fortune, the premium in-game currency, will be removed from sale on 20th July.
Because you’ll still be able to play the game, and as a kind of “why not?” the Nighthaven season will be extended through to the very end, however this game is just being left to sail into the night. There won’t be any content changes, and even as the player base inevitably dwindles, there also will not be any further server merges. The only exception is that they will monitor bugs and performance issues.
New World’s failure is pretty significant. The game arrived with a huge bang in 2021, as Amazon brought its fantasy colonialist MMORPG to PC, racing to a huge peak of over 900,000 concurrent players that pushed the servers beyond the limit. After such a strong start, the playerbase (via SteamDB) dwindled through early 2022, but enjoyed a new peak of over 130,000 for the first yearly expansion. Perhaps a lot of expectation was put internally on the potential of the console port, which arrived with a major game overhaul last September in the form of New World: Aeternum, but on PC at least, the game has spent much of 2025 with daily peak player counts below 10,000, jumping up to 50,000 with the new Nighthaven update.
However, since the announced end of new content updates, the player count has understandably fallen to new lows. It last cracked the 2,000 player mark on 7th December and has been around 1,300 the last few days.
I’m sure plenty will log in for one last hurrah next January, just as was done for Anthem in the last few days.
