Amazon Games is getting out of the MMO business entirely. The company confirmed this week that it will hand publishing duties for Throne and Liberty and Lost Ark back to the studios that built them - NC's FirstSpark Games and Smilegate RPG respectively - closing out a Western publishing experiment that began with enormous ambition and ends, quietly, with two handover notices.
The timelines are staggered. Throne and Liberty moves to NC's own global services by the end of Q4 2026. Lost Ark runs on Amazon's infrastructure a little longer, with Smilegate assuming full control in early 2027.
Neither game is shutting down
This is the important part, because Amazon's track record invited the opposite assumption. Both games stay live. Player data, characters and real-money currencies carry across the transition, and neither developer has signalled any change to content cadence. For most players the only visible consequence should be agreeing to a new set of terms of service under a new operator.
That distinction matters given what happened to New World. Amazon halted active development on New World: Aeternum - its own in-house MMO, and the one title in this space it actually built rather than licensed - while promising servers would stay up. Handing Lost Ark and Throne and Liberty back to their creators is a materially better outcome than that, and both Korean studios are far better equipped to run their own games than any third party.
What the studios said
FirstSpark Games CEO Moonyoung Choi framed it as an upgrade rather than a rescue: "Taking a more direct role in global publishing makes so much sense for us, and so we're thrilled to lead the next chapter of Throne and Liberty directly as NC." Smilegate's statement was aimed at the people losing work rather than the players - thanking Amazon's team for "your dedication, late nights, and genuine passion" across both organisations.
That second quote is the one worth sitting with. Regional publishing for a live MMO is not a light job: it is community management, customer support, localisation, content operations and storefront work, running continuously for years. Two games' worth of that function is now surplus at Amazon, and the announcement arrives after a run of executive departures and repeated layoffs across the company's games division.
The strategy underneath
Read alongside the rest of Amazon's recent moves, the direction is not ambiguous. The company has been steering away from publishing PC and console games and toward Luna, its cloud streaming service - a shift that also produced the shutdown of Luna's third-party store integrations earlier this year. Publishing someone else's Korean MMO in the West is a low-margin, high-headcount business, and it does not obviously feed a streaming platform.
It is still a notable retreat. When Amazon signed Lost Ark and Throne and Liberty, the logic was that Korean MMOs had a Western audience that Korean studios could not reach alone. Lost Ark proved the first half of that decisively - it opened in February 2022 to more than a million concurrent players on Steam. What the last four years suggest is that the second half stopped being true. Smilegate and NC now run global operations directly, and the middleman they needed in 2022 is no longer one they need in 2027.
For players, the practical advice is simple: nothing to do yet. Watch for account migration notices from Smilegate and NC as each date approaches, and expect a new ToS prompt when it does.
