For a while, Amazon Game Studios put a huge number of its eggs into the basket of MMORPGs, and particularly Asian-developed MMORPG projects at that. We saw the company publishing and supporting Lost Ark, Throne and Liberty, and also the western made New World/New World: Aeternum, and clearly this gamble hasn't paid off.
At the start of 2026, it was revealed New World would be shutting down for good, with the game set to be taken offline and made inaccessible to the many, many fans who snagged a copy. Building on this, yesterday we reported on the news that Amazon Game Studios is stepping back from its publishing role on Lost Ark in the west, handing this task back to developer Smilegate. It turns out this was a double-whammy piece of news.
We say this as it has also been confirmed Amazon Game Studios is exiting its role as the western publisher for Throne and Liberty too, giving the responsibility back to developer First Spark Games/NC. This will be happening rather soon, as the transition date has been locked in for Q4 of 2026, and for those wondering, it shouldn't actually have much of an impact on players.
We're told in a blog post: "No changes will be made to your account, your characters, progression or inventory, your platform (Steam, PlayStation, Xbox), your game data or access to the game itself, unless you opt out. Things that are changing include the game's publisher, customer support provider, support channels and policies, live operations team and the Terms of Service (all players will be asked to access new Terms of Service from NC)."
If you do decide to opt-out of the new terms and conditions agreement, your data will simply not be transferred and therefore it will effectively be lost, which is why it's "strongly recommended" to agree to the ToS.
So there we have it, Amazon Game Studios has all but concluded its efforts as an MMORPG and live-service-first publisher (including shutting down King of Meat earlier this year), as the major games it now has coming up we know about are Tomb Raider: Legacy of Atlantis and Tomb Raider: Catalyst, two single-player action-adventures.
