The most widespread reaction I've seen to Amazon laying off 30,000 people from its gaming division has been "Amazon had a gaming division?" That isn't surprising in itself; none of Amazon Games' releases (mostly generic fantasy MMOs) ever came close to breaching the mainstream despite massive teams and functionally unlimited budget.
We could speculate about why that is all day long, but regardless, Amazon Gaming's biggest shot at becoming a household name was its in-development Lord of the Rings MMO. The same one it just canceled for a second time. The project was killed the first time in 2021 before a turbulent restart, and then again just this week. A LinkedIn post made yesterday by a laid-off developer simultaneously announcing and cancelling the project has since been deleted, but the pertinent parts have been archived:
The engineer in question is Ashleigh Amrine, who announced that she had lost her job on LinkedIn yesterday. "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)," she wrote.
"It's always tough to see such a strong team go through something like this," Amrine wrote in her post yesterday. "I've been lucky to work with some of the most skilled, creative, and kind developers I've ever met here."
Did some spiteful witch put a curse on The Lord of the Rings that keeps people from making good games based on it or something? It seems the only reasonable explanation.
User ratings of New World, Amazon Games' biggest project, have fallen to "Mostly Negative" on Steam in the wake of these layoffs. It's unlikely Amazon will face any repercussions beyond this.
