Amazon Is Out of the MMO Business: Lost Ark and Throne and Liberty Go Home
Five years after Lost Ark broke Steam records, Amazon is handing both of its Korean MMOs back to their makers. What happens to your account, your crystals and the games themselves.
In February 2022, Amazon looked like the new king of Western MMO publishing. Lost Ark, a Korean game few Westerners had heard of a year earlier, hit 1.325 million concurrent players on Steam, the second-highest peak in the platform's history at the time. Four and a half years later, Amazon is walking away from the genre entirely.
On August 12, 2026, Amazon announced that it would stop publishing both of its licensed Korean MMOs. Throne and Liberty moved to its developer NC on November 10, 2026, and Lost Ark returns to its developer Smilegate in early 2027, after a brief maintenance window. Both games keep running.
Why Amazon left
Amazon did not give a single official reason in the announcement Game Developer reviewed. The context speaks for itself, though:
- Active development on Amazon's own MMO, New World: Aeternum, ended at the end of 2025.
- A memo attributed to Amazon executive Steve Boom said the company had made the "difficult decision" to halt a significant amount of its first-party AAA development, with MMOs a focus.
- Amazon also scaled back its Luna cloud service, shut down King of Meat six months after launch and dropped other projects.
Amazon still has games: it is the publisher of the upcoming Tomb Raider titles. But for MMOs, the experiment is over.
Lost Ark: what players need to know
Amazon's FAQ for Lost Ark is unusually detailed. The key points:
- Your account carries over automatically. Characters, progression, inventory and entitlements transfer, unless you choose to opt out.
- Wallet balances are honoured in full. Royal Crystals, Blue Crystals, Gold and Silver move at 100% value as of the transition date.
- Steam stays. The game remains on Steam with no reinstall or repurchase; you link your Steam account to Smilegate on first login.
- Some data does not transfer: in-game mail, friend memos, guild nicknames, chat history and a few other social details. Claim mail before the switch.
- Spanish language support ended with the October 2026 update, so the Western version is now English-only.
- Premium currency purchases will be switched off shortly before the move, and Smilegate will set its own refund policy afterwards.
Throne and Liberty: already home
Throne and Liberty's switch is done. NC and FirstSpark Games say players on Steam, PlayStation, Xbox and NC's PURPLE platform kept everything, and anyone logging in between November 11 and December 16 gets a free level 75 gear boost (full details).
The bigger trend
The pattern is clear: Korean studios increasingly want to run their games abroad themselves. NC published AION 2 globally on its own PURPLE platform and Steam this autumn. XLGAMES chose to self-publish ArcheAge Chronicles in the West, saying direct contact with players was the point. Now Lost Ark and Throne and Liberty join them.
Why it matters
For players, the risk is short-term turbulence: new terms of service, new support teams and a maintenance day. The upside is speed. A developer that publishes its own game can ship Korean updates to the West faster, fix things without a middleman and talk directly to its audience. WGC's take: Amazon opened the door for Korean MMOs in the West, and that deserves credit. But these games were always going to be happiest at home. Watch how fast Smilegate closes the content gap once the keys change hands in 2027 (our Lost Ark story).