As the gates of Aeternum slowly close, a surprising offer from the industry is causing a stir: the COO of Facepunch Studios wants to buy the game and hand it over to the community.
Now there is certainty for all fans of the online role-playing game: New World: Aeternum will finally go offline on January 31, 2027. This was announced by the developers at Amazon Games in a recent community post. This marks the end of the journey for the MMO, which launched in 2021 with huge hype and nearly a million concurrent players.
The game disappeared from all stores yesterday, January 15, 2026. Those who already have the title in their library can still play it for just under a year. But there is a potential rescue attempt coming from an unexpected direction.
The roadmap to server shutdown
Before we get into the million-dollar offer, here are the hard facts for all active players.
The most important dates at a glance:
- January 15, 2026: The game was removed from stores. New installations for owners are still possible.
- July 20, 2026: The in-game store will be closed. From this date onwards, it will no longer be possible to purchase lucky tokens. According to Amazon, there are no plans to refund currency that has already been purchased.
- January 31, 2027: The servers will be shut down worldwide on all platforms (PC, PS5, Xbox). After that, the game will effectively no longer be usable.
$25 million for immortality
As Amazon pulls the plug, Alistair McFarlane speaks up. He is Chief Operations Officer at Facepunch Studios, the team behind the extremely successful survival hit Rust. On Platform X, he responded to the news of the end with a concrete offer: He is offering $25 million to save New World.
His plan differs fundamentally from the strategy of large publishers. McFarlane doesn’t just want to continue operating the MMO, he wants to hand control directly over to the players:
Ali, you can save it. DO IT!! Also, I agree, they have Amazon money behind them. They should either host at least 10 servers for a few more years for the hardcore base (like 5,000 players?) or give the players server tools to host their own games.
— StabbyMcStabface (@Horrorview) January 15, 2026
“As with everything we do at Facepunch, it’s about empowering the community. Give them control, make the servers publicly hostable. A game will live on forever in the hands of a dedicated community.“
Whether Amazon Games is even open to discussion or whether $25 million would be enough for the rights to the brand and technology is pure speculation at this point.
Exclusive: Stop Killing Games responds
The New World case has reignited the debate about the ownership of digital goods and the preservation of online games. We asked Ross Scott, the initiator of the Stop Killing Games campaign, for his assessment. The initiative is fighting globally on a political and legal level against the practice of rendering functioning games unusable as soon as the publisher discontinues support.
Speaking to GlobalESportNews, Scott takes a nuanced view of the $25 million offer. While he would be happy if the game were not destroyed, he considers the overall situation absurd.
“25 million dollars sounds like a reasonable offer for the entire intellectual property rights to New World. But having to bribe a publisher to allow customers to keep what they’ve already paid for is a ridiculous standard by any measure.”
Scott points out that several countries are currently investigating whether practices such as those used in New World are even legal. If this is deemed unlawful, McFarlane’s offer could be interpreted as paying a publisher not to break the law.
“Either way, I don’t want to see it become standard practice for publishers to sell games back to paying players for ransom.”
Regarding the initiative itself, Scott announced that further announcements will follow in the next month or two. There is currently a lot of movement in the political and legal arena.
For Amazon, the New World chapter is almost over: The fact that an industry veteran like Rust’s COO is publicly offering such a sum to enforce the principle of community servers shows, at the very least, that awareness of game preservation is growing in the industry.
It remains to be seen whether Amazon will accept the offer – even if, realistically speaking, the chances of this are extremely slim. For now, fans can only enjoy the remaining twelve months in Aeternum before the servers are finally shut down on January 31, 2027.
