As Amazon cut thousands of jobs, New World: Aeternum will see no more updates

Amazon recently announced pretty heavy job cuts, and it seems they're pulling back on video game funding with New World: Aeternum no longer being supported. In the Amazon announcement they noted "an overall reduction in our corporate workforce of approximately 14,000 roles". Ouch.

Why? They don't actually say exactly why in the announcement, but of course it's AI-related:

Some may ask why we’re reducing roles when the company is performing well. Across our businesses, we're delivering great customer experiences every day, innovating at a rapid rate, and producing strong business results. What we need to remember is that the world is changing quickly. This generation of AI is the most transformative technology we’ve seen since the Internet, and it's enabling companies to innovate much faster than ever before (in existing market segments and altogether new ones). We’re convinced that we need to be organized more leanly, with fewer layers and more ownership, to move as quickly as possible for our customers and business.

Coming with this news we had the announcement that New World: Aeternum is having the plug pulled on it. The game will receive no more updates, but previous updates for existing owners have been made free. Amazon said the servers will remain online in 2026, but they aren't going into any specifics on exactly how long the game will be online. Eventually of course, they will no doubt completely shut it down. It's only a matter of time before another game is just lost.

Why? They said "After four years of steady content updates and a major new console release, we've reached a point where it is no longer sustainable to continue supporting the game with new content updates". Which is surprising, considering through October it saw quite a big resurgence in players. But even before that, it was still seeing peaks on Steam of over 10,000 per day — but for the likes of Amazon, clearly that's not enough.

While the FAQ in the announcement noted you should still be able to grab the game to play it, the Steam page has no current way to do so. The area where it would have a buy button or an add to account button for free games is just entirely blank now as shown below:

A full staff memo from Steve Boom, VP of audio, Twitch, and games was shared on The Verge, which notes "we have made the difficult decision to halt a significant amount of our first-party AAA game development work – specifically around MMOs – within Amazon Game Studios, including making significant role reductions in our studios in Irvine and San Diego, as well as our central publishing team".

Amazon only just recently did a refresh of Amazon Luna, their cloud gaming service which now has more of a focus on party games and a weird Snoop Dog AI game.