Rust director offers Amazon $25m to save its New World MMO

Earlier this week, Amazon Game Studios announced its intent to shut down its struggling MMO New World, with the developer now scheduled to take its servers offline at the end of next January. New World: Aeternum was also delisted from all console and PC storefronts immediately, and is no longer available to purchase.

New World nearly hit 1 million concurrent Steam users at launch, but its performance rapidly and sharply plummeted due to its lackluster quests and endgame, and it ultimately never recovered. Now, the game is dying — but the dev leading the studio that made one of the most popular survival games of all time is offering to save it.

Alistair McFarlane, COO and director of Rust developer Facepunch Studios, has put forward a “final offer” of $25 million to Amazon to buy New World from the company’s game dev division, adding that “games should never die” in a follow-up post.

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Given the nature of the thread the offer was posted in — another Rust dev joked she couldn’t get McFarlane to buy New World for her — there’s a solid chance it was made entirely in jest, and that McFarlane isn’t actually being serious here. But hey, maybe he’d actually go through with it if Amazon expressed interest in taking him up on it. Who knows?

Regardless of the offer being legit or not, McFarlane does have a suggestion for New World’s developers to consider: “As with everything we do at Facepunch, empower the community. Give them control, make servers publicly hostable. A game will live forever in the hands of a dedicated community.”

Notably, a few other devs commented on McFarlane’s proposal. Palworld communications director Bucky jokingly vowed “I’ll go halfs with you if we release the original NW alpha as a separate game mode,” to which McFarlane replied with an enthusiastic “heck yeah.”

Simon Collins-Laflamme — the creator of the long-awaited, Minecraft-inspired sandbox RPG Hytale that just came out in Early Access and is currently blowing up — extended some support of his own. “If you need tips about buying cancelled games, lmk,” he wrote.

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Indeed, Collins-Laflamme has experience with that process; his team Hypixel Studios was acquired by Riot Games in 2020, with the League of Legends creator aiming to support the developer as it made Hytale. Riot canceled it and then shuttered Hypixel last year, however, but Collins-Laflamme saved the project by buying it back and releasing it in Early Access shortly afterwards.

Ultimately, only time will tell if McFarlane’s $25m bid actually results in anything, but it sure would be cool if it did. New World’s problems are numerous, but a sizable community did enjoy the game, and there were good things to say about it, too. It looked great, felt good to play, had some nifty combat mechanics, and featured awesome large-scale 50v50 PvP.

Sadly, the only thing McFarlane has heard from Amazon thus far is an update on his snack delivery. “I have good news! I have received a update from Amazon, following my offer to buy New World,” he cheekily posted on Friday morning. “They’re delivering my order of beef jerky tomorrow.”

Are you hoping to see New World saved from its upcoming shutdown? Do you think McFarlane’s offer is purely a joke, or do you believe he’d actually go through with buying the MMO if Amazon accepted his proposal? Share your thoughts in the comments.

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