Massively multiplayer online games Lost Ark and Throne and Liberty will lose Amazon Game Studios as their publisher in the coming months, as the tech company continues to abandon its gaming efforts.
On Wednesday, blog posts on both MMOs’ websites confirmed the news. Amazon Game Studios will back out of supporting Throne and Liberty first, sometime in Q4 2026. Once that happens, publishing duties will revert to FirstSpark Games and NC (formerly NCSoft). When that transition happens, players should still have access to their pre-existing characters and accounts on PC and consoles unless they choose to opt out of having their data transferred to NC.
In early 2027, Lost Ark will follow suit, with developer Smilegate handling western publishing duties. When the transition from Amazon to Smilegate happens, Lost Ark players will retain their progression and account, ship, playlist, and NPC names, but will lose access to messages and memos that relate to in-game mail, friends list, blacklist, guilds, strongholds, and chats. As with Throne and Liberty, players can opt out of this if they don’t want Smilegate to obtain their data.
Amazon Game Studios positioned itself as the premier MMO publisher in the early 2020s, releasing New World and helping bring Asian MMOs like Lost Ark and Throne and Liberty to North America and Europe. Last October, Amazon began divesting from its gaming efforts. In the months since, it has set an end-of-service date New World, shut down King of Meat, backed out of publishing Maverick Games’ Clutch and MOBA March of Giants, and laid off developers.
As of now, the only titles Amazon Game Studios is still committed to publishing are Tomb Raider: Legacy of Atlantis, Tomb Raider: Catalyst, and party games for its cloud gaming service Luna. Amazon gaming GM Jeff Gattis also told gamexplore that the company is interested in publishing future James Bond games.
Lost Ark is available on Windows PC and Throne and Liberty is available on PlayStation 5, Windows PC, and Xbox Series X.
