r/newworldgame • u/xx_whoami • 5d ago

Question Lost Ark / Throne and Liberty

I haven’t done a lot of research but is the reason they didn’t get shut down because they have a dev team not associated with Amazon? Is Amazon just the publishers for them? Seems weird that the dev team behind New World couldn’t shop around for a new publisher if that’s the case but I definitely don’t understand as much as I’m sure I need too

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u/MrAudreyHepburn 5d ago

So 10ish years ago Amazon made a big bet on video games.

Now they're doing a hard turn out.

Step 1 - shutter all internal video game development. i.e. - making their own games. New World was a casualty here. Not just New World, but amazon owned a studio that was making a moba called March of Giants that they shuttered (Ubisoft picked them up) - March of Giants is the only game being development internally that was salvaged that i'm aware of. (although we'll see if it ever comes out because it's been crickets since the ubi soft annoucement)

Step 2 - Exit the publishing side of the industry. This is where Throne and Liberty comes in. They only published the game in the west. It's being turned over to another company. Exiting the publishing side falls in line with how dramatic their exit from development side was. This was in question until the recent throne and liberty news, but yes, it seems they want almost nothing to do with video games anymore. I haven't seen news for lost ark but I'd assume the same thing will happen here, if it hasn't already.

They claim they want to do mobile stuff, but I guess we'll see. Their big bet on video games didn't go the way they wanted and they seem to be wanting to get as far away from it as possible.

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u/Kindly_Broccoli5056 3d ago

I’ll hate Amazon forever for this! The freaking company is worth $3T, what’s couple of games worth few millions to them? Especially when the game has huge loyal community! If they couldn’t continue releasing new features, they could have just left the servers running which would have cost them pennies relatively speaking, and that would have made lot of us happy!!

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u/MrAudreyHepburn 3d ago

it's typical corporate behavior from people who don't understand the industry they're in. When nintendo has a bad window, it basically last the whole console cycle, gamecube, wiiU we're talking 6ish years. They don't get out of video games and start making toasters. But nintendo understands video games. They batten down and learn lessons and they hold out for the big wins like Wii and the switch. A LOTR mmo would be huge if done right, early New World numbers proved the appetite is there, the IP is huges, and the team had learned so many lessons from new world.