Rust Director Offered Amazon $25 Millions to Get New World and Keep It Alive
Amazon Games has now put a hard end date on New World: Aeternum, delisting the MMORPG on January 15, 2026 and confirming it will go offline permanently on January 31, 2027.
That finality triggered an unexpectedly public lifeline from outside Amazon. Facepunch Studios chief operating officer and company director Alistair McFarlane, best known in the industry for helping steward long tail hits like Rust and Garry’s Mod, posted an on the record offer on X that quickly went viral: a 25,000,000$ bid to buy New World from Amazon, paired with the simple philosophy that games should never die. The post is light on deal mechanics, but heavy on intent, and it has immediately reframed the conversation from farewell tour to potential handoff.
Industry reaction has been split between playful skepticism and cautious curiosity. Several outlets note the offer reads like a public negotiation opener rather than a formal filing, but also highlight that McFarlane followed up with a practical direction of travel: community empowerment, including making servers publicly hostable so the game could outlive official corporate support.
The strategic subtext is hard to ignore. New World is a recognizable brand with a built world, an established player base, and years of live service learnings already baked in. For a studio like Facepunch, which has proven it can run durable games for the long haul, an acquisition would be less about building a new MMO from scratch and more about replatforming operations around what Facepunch does best: creator driven longevity, tooling, and community led sustainment. Whether that model cleanly maps onto a theme park MMO is the core risk, since ongoing content cadence and backend live operations are resource heavy in ways that differ from sandbox driven ecosystems.
There is also precedent that Amazon is willing to divest game assets under the right circumstances. In late 2025, Ubisoft announced it would acquire the Amazon Games Montréal team and the in development MOBA March of Giants, showing that Amazon can choose exit routes beyond simply sunsetting projects outright.
For now, Amazon has not signaled interest in selling New World, and the shutdown date remains the only concrete operational milestone. But the public 25,000,000$ offer has already changed the narrative into one key question: does Amazon want a clean shutdown, or a reputationally cleaner transfer that lets the community keep Aeternum alive under a new operator.
What would you rather see for New World: a community hosted future under a new owner, or a final year with an official goodbye tour before the lights go out on January 31, 2027?
