What future awaits Amazon Game Studios, the publishing and video game subsidiary of the online commerce giant? The answer is still pending a few days after the announcement of more than 14,000 job cuts within the company, which intends to refocus on artificial intelligence to automate certain tasks, but also on cloud gaming.
The result is the closure or complete cancellation of several video game projects. The first to be a victim is none other than New Worldits first massively multiplayer online (MMO) game, released in 2021. If the title had had some success four years ago, player interest in this open-world epic with cooperative and competitive mechanics between guilds quickly faded.
The end of someone who already looked like a giant
Despite the release of an expansion in 2023, adding a new zone and mounts, but also a redesign and a console release in 2024, the game’s population has continued to decline over time. Therefore, a large part of the development team was thanked, as confirmed by Amazon Game Studios in a message greeting the community for its participation.
If the servers remain online in 2026 (nothing is specified for after that), no new content will be offered in the future. On the other hand, we expected an online game in the world of the lord of the rings. But according to a former manager affected by the layoffs, Amazon ended the project: “It’s a shame, you would have liked it,” he said in a now-deleted Linkedin post.
The title was described in 2021 as “an online adventure in a persistent world” and was intended to promote the Amazon Prime Video series, whose second season did not have the expected success given its enormous budget (more than $500 million).
Amazon also specialized in publishing South Korean MMOs, in particular lost ark AND Throne and freedom. For these two titles, whose population is still very far from the objectives, the updates should continue based on the adaptations in the West of those already present in Asia. According to information collected by Tech&Co from people familiar with the matter, the contract between Amazon and its partners requires it to continue monitoring “at least for a while.” But players are already wondering about medium-term survival.
A future strategy that still needs to convince
Amazon therefore wants to reorient its activities in the future. The company has never really managed to enter the gaming sector. It tried to tackle cloud gaming, taking on well-established competitors like Xbox Cloud Gaming or Nvidia’s Geforce Now, without success.
A redesign of its service, Luna, was recently launched with the aim of reversing the trend. From now on we will be able to access a catalog enriched with several important but relatively old games, such as The Hogwarts Legacy AND Indiana Jones and the Ancient Circleas well as several small productions that can be performed by several people.
Amazon will also continue to develop games internally but aimed at a more casual audience. This is the case of king of encounterwhich used the services of MrBeast for its launch, and which is presented as a cooperative game in the format of a television program. The truth is that a month after its launch (October 2, 2025), the project already seems stillborn with a maximum peak of 253 players on Steam, according to SteamDB figures, and only 33 players online in the last 24 hours.
Finding the correct equation is a complicated gymnastics. Compared to 2023 when Amazon signed on to develop a new game tomb Raider Together with Crystal Dynamics (which does not seem concerned about either the change in strategy or the layoffs at this point), which is already considered the new giant of video games, a wall has visibly been imposed between ambitions and reality.
Source: BFM TV
