I'm sure you all know by now that Amazon Game Studios has basically "pulled the plug" on New World: Aeternum and it can no longer be bought on steam. Link: https://www.newworld.com/en-us/news/articles/update-on-new-world

Quick rundown of the situation: New World released their season 10 recently where it brought a lot of returning and new players (me included) to the game with new hope that this game will actually turn out to be the MMO they promised. Lo and behold AGS had huge layoffs and Amazon pulled the plug on the game, meaning that no new content will be made. There are promises of them supporting the game until the end of 2026, but with so many people deciding to stop playing, and quite understandably so, I have the feeling that they'll just announce that there is no point in keeping servers alive, so basically they are silently sun setting the game. All your time and money invested in the game - poof, gone like a fart in the wind.

The whole situation made me think - there are actually NO other MMOs that are worth the player's time and money except the titans that we know about already and have played hundreds of hours. All new MMOS coming out and that have come out the last years either have aggressive cash shop and are P2W or just, as we have seen, stop getting supported after X amount of time.

So taking into account all of that we have the following options:

World of Warcraft

Final Fantasy XIV

Guild Wars 2

ESO

Old School Rune Scape

RuneScape

Those MMORPG games are the only ones that are worth your time and money and have low chance of the developers shutting down the game out of the blue. Those games are the only ones where you get a steady return of your time and money invested.

Other than that, I feel really sorry for the developers of New World and I can't imagine how gutted they feel, it seemed like they actually cared about the game and wanted to deliver the experience they promised. I really wanted this game to be the new "No Man's Sky redemption arc", but unfortunately this is the situation that we have...

In a sweeping layoff, Amazon is getting rid of 30k+ people today, and in the future they will remove more and more to replace them with AI.

New World is feeling these layoffs, some people are missing from the discord, and artists are posting on Twitter talking about being laid off. We don't know the full extent of the layoffs yet, as they're going out this morning.

I'm worried for the future of the game.

Edit Update: The Amazon Employees subreddit is saying the entire Irvine AGS studio is gone. That's the one that runs New World.

Edit Update 2: Amazon Games jobs listings do not have the Irvine site listed. Probably confirmation New World is cooked.

Edit Update 3: The AGS LinkedIn page no longer exists. I think we might be cooked cooked.