Alistair McFarlane, the COO and director of Facepunch Studios, the game studio behind survival shooter Rust, has seemingly offered Amazon $25 million to buy New World: Aeternum after Amazon announced that the MMO would be decommissioned on January 31, 2027. The executive made the offer in a short public post on X, but he seems to be serious about it, with a follow-up post simply stating that “Games should never die.” Given that Amazon is still planning on keeping New World alive for nearly a year, it seems unlikely that we’ll get any updates about any potential IP transfers before then.
The post was, expectedly, followed up by questions from Facepunch and Rust fans, and in response to one fan, McFarlane said that “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,” seemingly stating that if Amazon took him up on his offer, Facepunch would take over development and turn the game into a community-driven MMO following the classic self-hosted model.
