Amazon Games is also withdrawing as a publisher from the MMORPG genre. But what does this mean for Lost Ark and Throne and Liberty? MeinMMO editor Karsten Scholz analyzes the possible impacts.
It’s easy to criticize Amazon Games. I have done so often. Most recently just a few days ago, because I am annoyed by how little has been made of the almost unmatched potential in the end. The ambitions were huge. The resources and building blocks were available. What remains is a pile of rubble and many canceled projects.
However, the two sides of the coin also include that Amazon Games has done well for the two Asian titles Lost Ark (released in 2022 here) and Throne and Liberty (2024) as a western publisher, helping significantly to deliver the biggest MMORPG releases of recent years.
Was everything perfect? Certainly not. However, I am sure that both online RPGs would have been significantly less successful without the support of the New World creators. Accordingly, I now look with skepticism at the future of the two MMORPGs.
Amazon Games as Publisher
In my analysis of Amazon Games’ work, I had already highlighted it once: As a publisher, the studio enjoys a similarly mixed reputation with many western genre fans as for its role as the developer of New World and failures like Crucible, Nova, Intensity or Breakaway.
This is partly, of course, due to the fact that Amazon Games has made some mistakes as a publisher, especially in terms of not always optimal communication with its own community:
At times, reasonable patch notes for the updates of Lost Ark were missing, there was trouble about a withheld roadmap that had already gone live in Russia, and during a Gamescom presentation for New World in 2021, viewers on Twitch received a timeout if they wrote “Lost Ark” in the chat … all of this was not optimal.
A large part of the criticism from the community has always been directed at some of the peculiarities that Asian MMORPGs like Lost Ark and Throne and Liberty unfortunately almost always bring along. A western publisher can only gather feedback here and pass it on to the actually responsible developers, make recommendations, and communicate the decisions of the decision-makers with the players.
In other words: Amazon Games does not ultimately decide such things. The publisher cannot simply overturn the payment model in the western version and remove the real money currency from the auction house. However, they certainly helped initiate the various adjustments for the global launches and beyond, making Lost Ark and Throne and Liberty better online RPGs.
This is in addition to the typical tasks of a publisher such as localizing the games into several languages, providing websites in, for example, German, community support … all things that as a western player one considers normal, but which often have to be waived when an Asian developer brings their game to the west on their own.
And incidentally, Lost Ark and Throne and Liberty naturally also benefited from the big name of Amazon and the strong synergy with Twitch. Especially Lost Ark was able to build up enormous hype through the support of many streamers. This would not have been possible in this form without the partnership with Amazon.
What does the future hold for Lost Ark and Throne and Liberty?
In part, we have been seeing the effects of Amazon Games’ withdrawal as the publisher of the two games for months. Lost Ark has since suspended support for various languages and has not been publishing news on the western website in German for some time now.
Throne and Liberty, on the other hand, has long been shining with the monthly release of Tico Talks, in which Associate Franchise Lead Tico kept the western community updated on the current status of the game, upcoming updates, and long-term plans. Since his transition from Amazon Games to NCSoft, there has been no further episode.
More on the best genre in the world can also be found on our YouTube channel from MeinMMO. There you can currently find a video on the topic Sandbox versus Themepark – which MMORPG suits you?
In both cases, only the essentials are happening with a view to the care of western players, and this will deteriorate further when the respective Asian developers take care of global publishing. They are far away and have rarely kept the global market in mind when making design decisions.
If anyone still had hopes that Lost Ark and Throne and Liberty could improve on frustrating points such as the payment model or the high grind factor, I see black for them. At best, hardly anything changes, as Amazon Games had only been doing the bare minimum recently.
Personally, I expect that both games will increasingly fade into insignificance over the coming months, at least for the western MMO community. A turnaround could only be achieved with larger investments, and for that, the current player numbers in the west are simply too small.
Aion 2 on the Horizon
My gaze is now directed towards Aion 2, which will be released by NCSoft worldwide at the end of September or early October without a western publisher. The Korean publisher and developer is large enough to be able to deploy at least a western team to take care of the global version of the prestige MMORPG internally.
But will that be enough to ensure that the western community feels heard and understood? I definitely expect potential conflict points here. It is already clear that there have been various adjustments for the global release, but they want to stick to certain features that are viewed critically in the west. More on this here: Aion 2 finally reveals how the western version is supposed to look at launch
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