Amazon Game Studios is handing two of the online worlds it published back to Korea. On 12 August 2026 it announced, in a post about Throne and Liberty, that day-to-day running of that game moves to two other companies from the last quarter of 2026. A near-identical post the same day sent Lost Ark back to Smilegate in early 2027.

Who is who, in a line. Throne and Liberty goes to FirstSpark Games, which is the studio that develops it, and to NCSOFT, its Korean owner. Lost Ark goes to Smilegate, the Korean studio behind that one. Amazon Game Studios published both in the West. And both are MMOs, which stands for massively multiplayer online games, the kind thousands of people share at once.

Two handovers, side by side

Neither August post gave a day, and both use the same phrase about returning the game to the people who made it. Worth noticing, given both went out the same day. For Throne and Liberty, Amazon named the day on 9 October: the service transition maintenance begins on 10 November 2026, and it will share the start time and length closer to then.

Our take: what it means for players

A handover is a different thing from a shutdown, and we want that stated before anything else. The two get conflated every time, and the conflation costs a game its population.

Both worlds keep running. What changes is who answers when something breaks, who funds the Western translation, and who decides the shop. Neither August post said anything about any of that. Amazon's 9 October post answers part of it. NC, the name it uses for the developer, which works through its FirstSpark Games studio, takes over customer support, and old support tickets don't transfer. In the shop, Celebration Packs, Character Boost and Lucent packs come off sale on 26 October until the transition is complete. Lucent and items you already own transfer with your account, and NC will say when the shop returns. Our expectation is that an operator with a direct line to the developers ships regional content faster, and that the shop is the thing to watch, because a new operator sets its own pricing and nobody has published theirs.

The uncomfortable read is what these two posts say together, and we will label it as ours rather than Amazon's. Amazon spent nearly five years on one of these games and nearly two on the other, and announced both exits on one day. Both posts give the same reason, and it is a generous one: handing the game back to the developers, so their passion for it can keep being realised. Our reading is that a reason this warm, arriving twice on one morning, is also a judgement about the business of running these games in the West. Players should weigh it that way rather than as a verdict on the worlds they play in.

Amazon's third online world is on a different footing again. New World is its colonial-era fantasy game, and we covered its dated shutdown from Amazon's own separate notice.

What we asked for here was a date. A quarter is not a date, and an account holder with a paid reward track or an unspent currency balance is entitled to know the day their relationship changes hands. Throne and Liberty players now know the day the handover begins, and Amazon's 9 October post says characters, items, currency and progress all transfer unless a player opts out before 30 October. When we last checked Lost Ark's tracker row, on 6 October, its players had only "early 2027", and until a day is published, everything downstream of it is a question nobody can answer.

What's next

Both transfers sit on the sunset tracker as handovers rather than shutdowns, with the dates or windows the publishers have actually given and the day we last checked each. New World's shutdown is on the same page, with the date Amazon gave in its own notice.