"Games Should Never Die" Rust Director Offers Amazon…

New World: Aeternum may shut down forever, but the director of Rust is trying to stop that with a multi-million dollar offer to Amazon. The Rust director recently made the offer in light of recent news regarding the MMORPG ending, and fans are hoping that it might be enough to save New World: Aeternum.

Initially announced in 2016 and released in 2021, New World: Aeternum is an MMORPG produced by Amazon Games. The game only arrived on consoles in 2024, and even received a TV adaptation episode in the Secret Level series the same year, which had much of the playerbase expecting that the game had a solid future ahead of it. However, things started to look concerning for the game when Amazon announced that it was cutting jobs across Amazon Games. It didn't take long for New World: Aeternum's shutdown to be announced, with Amazon revealing that Season 10 would mark the end of New World: Aeternum content, and that the game would be completely shut down by 2027.

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By Eric Law

Rust Director Steps Up to Save New World: Aeternum

Following the announcement revealing the exact shutdown date of January 31, 2027, Alistair McFarlane, the director of Facepunch Studios, which developed survival game Rust, has made an offer to Amazon in an effort to save the game. He sent a tweet to Amazon Games stating that he was offering to buy the game for $25 million, with a follow-up tweet stating that "Games should never die." Alistair has yet to say if Amazon has responded to the offer in any way, so for now, New World: Aeternum's fate remains hanging in the balance.

In addition to the offer, McFarlane also suggested that in lieu of selling the game, Amazon should consider giving control of the title to the players by allowing public servers. He said that "a game will live forever in the hands of a dedicated community," pointing to his own development studio and the way that it does things. A number of players and fans have chimed in with their own hopes that the game can be saved in some way, expressing frustration at the situation and some sharing hesitance around ever playing another Amazon game in fear of this happening again.

Game Shutdowns are Controversial

With the recent trend of layoffs and game development studios being axed entirely, a number of games have recently been shut down or their releases canceled. For example, there was an uproar when it was announced that MultiVersus would shut down just a year after its full release, not only taking the game entirely offline but delisting it, so new players can't try it out at all. While it's obviously not financially viable for a company to host servers for a dead game forever, players have often asked for the opportunity to keep playing their favorites on private servers, or in an offline mode where it's possible.

Unfortunately, some games have never even gotten the chance to reach players in recent years, with upcoming titles like EA's Black Panther game being axed, the Perfect Dark Reboot being scrapped, or Riot Games killing Hytale after it spent a decade in development. In most cases, there's nothing that can be done about it, but McFarlane's chances of saving New World: Aeternum may not be as farfetched as it seems. In the case of Hytale, the developer was successfully able to reacquire the rights to the game from Riot Games, and has since released Hytale into early access.

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New World: Aeternum also isn't the only game that's recently seen devs trying to rescue it from a total shutdown. A former BioWare exec has proposed a plan to save Anthem by converting it into a single-player RPG, which they estimate would cost $10 million to do. At this point, it's not known if the efforts to save New World or Anthem will be successful, but players remain hopeful.

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