Amazon Games Drops Lost Ark and Throne and Liberty Publishing

Massively multiplayer online games Lost Ark and Throne and Liberty are losing Amazon Game Studios as their publisher in the coming months as the tech company continues to scale back its gaming efforts.

Blog posts on both games’ websites confirmed the news. Amazon Game Studios will stop supporting Throne and Liberty first during the fourth quarter of 2026. Publishing duties will then revert to FirstSpark Games and NC, formerly known as NCSoft. Players will keep their existing characters and accounts on PC and consoles unless they choose to opt out of transferring their data to NC.

Lost Ark will follow suit in early 2027 when developer Smilegate takes over western publishing duties. Players will keep their progression, accounts, ships, playlists, and NPC names. However, they will lose access to messages and memos related to in-game mail, friend lists, blacklists, guilds, strongholds, and chats. Players can similarly opt out if they do not want Smilegate to receive their data.

Amazon Game Studios positioned itself as a major MMO publisher in the early 2020s by releasing New World and bringing Asian MMOs like Lost Ark and Throne and Liberty to North America and Europe. The company began pulling back from gaming last October. Since then, Amazon has set an end-of-service date for New World, shut down King of Meat, backed out of publishing Maverick Games’ Clutch and the MOBA March of Giants, and laid off developers.

Amazon Game Studios remains committed to publishing Tomb Raider: Legacy of Atlantis, Tomb Raider: Catalyst, and party games for the Luna cloud gaming service. Amazon gaming general manager Jeff Gattis also told Polygon that the company is interested in publishing future James Bond games.

Lost Ark is available on Windows PC, while Throne and Liberty is available on PlayStation 5, Windows PC, and Xbox Series X.

Source: Polygon