New World: Aeternum, which is an action role-playing world set on a single haunted island, is switched off on 31 January 2027. And the game's own shutdown notice lays out the wind-down rather than just the ending. The game was pulled from sale on 15 January 2026, and in-game purchases stopped on 20 July 2026. The last season stays running until the lights go out.

Aeternum is that island. Nighthaven, further down, is the game's most recent season, which is a named run of content. Marks of Fortune are the currency you buy with real money and spend in the game's shop.

The full timeline

Can you get a refund for New World?

It depends what you bought, and the notice takes the two cases differently. Marks of Fortune: no. The notice says refunds are not available for Marks of Fortune purchases. The game itself, bought recently: ask the platform's customer support. The notice's answer there is to check with customer support for the platform where you purchased New World: Aeternum, rather than giving one of its own.

Owners who already bought it can download and install it again, and can keep playing until the servers go offline on 31 January 2027.

Our take: what it means for players

This is close to the best version of a bad announcement, and the one part we would argue with is the refund line.

Start with what this notice got right, because it is more than most. A year of notice. A shutdown date named in advance rather than trickled out. Purchases switched off more than six months before the end, by our maths, so players are not spending money on a world with weeks left. The final season extended rather than cut short, and world bosses and bonus weeks left running so the game still has a heartbeat while it winds down. Compare that with the shutdowns we have covered that give a month's notice and stop the events immediately.

Now the refund. Marks of Fortune are a purchased currency, and any balance a player is holding on 31 January 2027 buys nothing, ever. The shop closed in July, and our reading is that this shows the problem was understood; the same notice then declines to refund the balances that closure stranded. Currency sold for real money and extinguished by the seller's own decision should come back to the person who paid for it. That is the whole argument against premium currencies in one line. They convert money into something the publisher can end.

The wider point is one we made when Throne and Liberty and Lost Ark were handed back to their studios, and it lands harder here. This game is being switched off on a named day. Our reading of those two handovers, in that piece and off their own announcements, is that neither named an end date. Those are genuinely different outcomes, and it is worth keeping them apart.

What's next

The notice dates nothing else. The shutdown sits on the sunset tracker with the day we last checked it against that notice, alongside the two handovers we covered from their own separate announcements.