Amid reports Amazon has ‘gutted’ its video games division as part of 14,000 company wide job cuts earlier this week, one former developer has suggested its Lord of the Rings MMO has also been cancelled.
On Tuesday, Bloomberg shared an internal memo to staff from Steven Boom (Amazon’s vice president of Audio, Twitch, and Game) announcing “significant role reductions” across Amazon Game Studios. Boom added the job cuts were a result of the company’s decision to halt a “significant amount of our first-party AAA game development work – specifically around MMOs”. Amazon is yet to reveal the exact number of employees affected within its games division.
Following that announcement, impacted staff began announcing their departure from Amazon on social media, with the ensuing messages suggesting teams from two projects – New World and the still-unreleased Lord of the Rings MMO announced back in 2023 – were both impacted. However, a LinkedIn post by former senior gameplay engineer Ashleigh Amrine suggests the Lord of the Rings MMO will now never see the light of day.
“This morning I was part of the layoffs at Amazon Games,” Amrine wrote, “alongside my incredibly talented peers on New World and our fledgling Lord of the Rings game (y’all would have loved it).”
If Amazon’s Lord of the Rings MMO is cancelled, it would mark the second such project to die a death under the company’s watch. It previously announced a different Lord of the Rings MMO back in 2019, but scrapped it amid reports of a dispute with Chinese mega-corp Tencent. Eurogamer has contacted Amazon for comment on the fate of is more recent Tolkien MMO.
As for New World, Amazon has now confirmed the MMO will no longer receive updates, but will remain playable for now. The company has guaranteed servers will remain live “through 2026” and promised to give “a minimum of six months’ notice” before making changes that would impact its availability. More details on its future are due “in the coming months”.
