Thursday, January 15th 2026
Amazon's New World Aeternum To Shut Down in January 2027
After it was announced in October 2025 that Amazon was making a shift away from AAA gaming and had stopped development of new content for New World: Aeternum, we speculated that the game was slowly being sunset. Originally, Amazon said that the game would be supported "through 2026," suggesting that it would not make it long into 2027. A new announcement from Amazon itself on the New World news page has confirmed this theory, stating that New World will officially go offline in January 2027. The post specifies that users will still be able to play New World: Aeternum until January 31, but the game will be delisted from all storefronts on January 15, 2026. As of the time of writing, New World: Aeternum is no longer available for purchase on Steam. Shortly before the aforementioned announcement that no new content would be released for New World, its player count on Steam peaked at an impressive 51,031 players, but that number has since fallen to around 1,200 daily concurrent players.
As part of the shutdown plans, the Nighthaven season will be extended to January 31 as well, effectively sending New World players off with a last hurrah. While all in-game features will remain active until January 31 2027, players will no longer be able to make in-game purchases after July 20, 2026. Amazon encourages players who unwittingly bought New World: Aeternum ahead of the shutdown news to contact support if they would like a refund, although there is no specific cutoff for refunds provided in the announcement. It's likely Steam will stick to its regular rules, which allow automatic refunds as long as players haven't spent more than two hours playing the game or didn't purchase it more than two weeks before the refund request.
Sources:
Amazon, Steam
As part of the shutdown plans, the Nighthaven season will be extended to January 31 as well, effectively sending New World players off with a last hurrah. While all in-game features will remain active until January 31 2027, players will no longer be able to make in-game purchases after July 20, 2026. Amazon encourages players who unwittingly bought New World: Aeternum ahead of the shutdown news to contact support if they would like a refund, although there is no specific cutoff for refunds provided in the announcement. It's likely Steam will stick to its regular rules, which allow automatic refunds as long as players haven't spent more than two hours playing the game or didn't purchase it more than two weeks before the refund request.
9 Comments on Amazon's New World Aeternum To Shut Down in January 2027
With its enormous resources, Amazon could simply have kept the game running. Shutting it down achieves nothing except ensuring that no one will buy the game now. Personally, I'm still waiting for it to become cheaper, or at least for it to no longer be distributed exclusively via the shabby Steam platform. TESO is also distributed by the publisher itself and by Epic (it was even free at one point!). In any case, Steam won't be getting any money from me. Anyone who loves TESO will adore New World Aeternum. It's a shame that I'll never own it myself or “play through” it. It's a shame that such masterpieces are being made to disappear forever by a forced online mode. I would also get New World Aeternum as a single-player offline version. I trust Amazon to refund your money, but I actually hope that all Steam users will come away empty-handed so that they finally understand that they have only rented their purchases for a limited time instead of buying them!
New World has been a spectacular flop. Shiny and new, but with no substance, it died real fast. The next WoW, this is not. It wasnt a masterpiece, it was a competent MMO that had no soul to keep it going past launch.