Following Amazon’s decision to cuts 14,000 jobs, a new report has claimed the company is “gutting” its video games division as part of the move.
That’s according to Bloomberg’s Jason Schreier, who, referencing a memo sent to Amazon employees, says the company plans to reduce the amount of work it does on big-budget titles, particularly MMOs. In the memo, Steven Boom (Amazon’s vice president of Audio, Twitch, and Game) wrote, “While we’re proud of our successes in first-party AAA game development and publishing, we have made the difficult decision to halt a significant amount of our first-party AAA game development work – specifically around MMOs – within Amazon Game Studios, including making significant role reductions in our studios in Irvine and San Diego, as well as our central publishing team.”
While Amazon hasn’t revealed the exact number of jobs being cut across its games division, affected employees are already taking to social media, suggesting teams from two projects – New World and the Lord of the Rings MMO announced back in 2023 – are impacted. On LinkedIn, former senior gameplay engineer Ashleigh Amrine wrote, “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).”
Amazon entered the video games market in disastrous fashion, cancelling its free-to-play shooter Crucible just five months after its release in 2020, and four months after it was “unreleased” back into beta. Its other failures include a first stab at a Lord of the Rings MMO, which was cancelled in 2021 following a dispute with Chinese mega-corp Tencent. New World, too, has struggled to sustain interest after a strong start in 2021. Amazon’s other major project is its upcoming Crystal Dynamics-developed upcoming Tomb Raider game, which was said to be “going well” in August last year.
