Overview
- Amazon announced Wednesday that it will transition Throne and Liberty to NC/FirstSpark in Q4 2026 and transfer Lost Ark to Smilegate in early 2027, returning Western live operations to the games’ creators.
- Most core account data—characters, progression, inventory, purchases and wallet balances—will migrate automatically but player-created free-text content such as in-game mail, chat history, friends-list notes and guild nicknames will not carry over.
- Active subscriptions will be cancelled before each handoff and long-term subscriptions have been removed from sale, so players should not buy multi-month plans and must expect to relink accounts and accept new developer terms when the transfers occur.
- Official websites, social channels and Discord moderation for the games will move to Smilegate and NC, shifting customer support, community management and moderation to the developers and creating a short window of operational change.
- The handoffs complete Amazon’s retreat from MMOs after prior layoffs and the New World wind-down, and while developers say they will minimize disruption there may be short-term delays to major content releases and some technical or community friction as systems are migrated.