Copyright escapistmagazine
Amazon has cut 14,000 jobs (and is suspected to potentially hit 30,000), and with it, its massively multiplayer online (MMO) game ambitions went straight into the trash. Not only did New World get taken out back just as it was about to hit some kind of stride, but an in-development Lord of the Rings MMO has been canned – for a second time. The Lord of the Rings MMO from Amazon has been in gestation for a number of years. Announced in 2019, it was scrapped the first time in 2021. Amazon’s investments in New World and Lost Ark brought some kind of MMO strategy to the company, whereby using the brute force of a company like Amazon, it could actually get something competent out the door. New World and Lost Ark have enjoyed some successes, but nothing that shook the foundations of the industry. In fact, if anything, MMOs that Amazon was eying to stomp into are now a dying breed, with gacha, live service, and online titles eating that side of the market. The first version of the game came to a halt when Tencent bought the studio developing it, Leyou. They were bought out for $1.5 billion, and contractual disputes caused the former poultry farming company to lose out. Yes, The Lord of the Rings Amazon MMO was going to be developed by an ex-poultry company. Video games are weird. This version was announced in 2023 and was claimed to have taken players through a persistent world, including events from The Hobbit and the actual trilogy itself. Deleted LinkedIn post gives small insight into Lord of the Rings MMO After the announcement, nothing was shown of the game, and the only real insight we have into its development is a now-deleted LinkedIn post. An engineer, Ashleigh Amrine, wrote on Microsoft-owned social network: “This morning I was part of the layoffs at Amazon Games, alongside my incredibly talented peers on New World and our fledgling Lord of the Rings game (y’all would have loved it). “It’s always tough to see such a strong team go through something like this. I’ve been lucky to work with some of the most skilled, creative, and kind developers I’ve ever met here.” It’s not the only MMO to bite the bucket this year. Microsoft’s Xbox division also scrapped an in-development MMO, despite Xbox head Phil Spencer having to have the controller taken away from him during the meeting. While Microsoft’s cancelation and layoffs can be pointed to the reported extraordinarily high margins, reportedly 30%, that the company wants Xbox to hit, Amazon is a different beast. AI reporter thinks it’s a different aspect of AI that resulted in Amazon layoffs In an internal memo, it’s claimed that the 4% cut is to “reduce bureaucracy” and “remove organizational layers”. Some also believe that it’s to do with the company embracing AI in certain areas of the corporate business. While these are all probably factors, an AI news reporter, Nate B Jones, believes that it’s tied to Amazon’s Web Services. AWS is enormous. When it goes down, most of the internet follows. It also supplies compute for AI projects, but according to Jones, Amazon is lagging behind in support. AWS has actually shrunk its growth too, now down to 18% year-over-year. That’s still a company making millions and millions and at no risk of falling over, even if it had kept the 4% of staff it cut. No, what seems to have happened, according to Jones, is that Amazon cannot keep up with the demand. It admitted so in February, but it’s now nearly November. Jones adds that if AWS looks bad, it can tank the stock, as that’s Amazon’s bread and butter. The storefront will always be there, but AWS is the money maker. So Amazon potentially cut 14,000 jobs because it needs AWS to stay gold. On top of that, Jones argues that Amazon’s lack of graphics units (GPUs), which power the AI projects they’re moving into, and the demand for them, is also a possible reason. Without the tens of millions of dollars spent on salaries from the laid-off people, this can be used to fight back against Google and Microsoft Azure’s dominance in the space. Did Amazon Gaming even know what it was doing? However, it should also be pointed out that an unearthed post from an ex-Amazon Gaming executive shows just how blinded Amazon is by its own hubris. While people would have flocked to a new Lord of the Rings MMO, it’s clear that the higher-ups in the division just had no real idea of what’s happening within the industry. The post digs into how Amazon failed to topple Steam, despite being “at least 250x bigger”. Effectively, they had created a solution with their game stores and Luna, which had already been solved. In a modern world where MMOs are on the downslope, outside of the stalwarts like World of Warcraft, RuneScape, and Final Fantasy XIV, launching whenever the game would have been ready seems like a bad move. The Escapist has reached out to Amazon to clarify the status of the game.
