Amazon passively confirmed the cancellation of The Lord of the Rings MMO at Eurogamer, who requested comment after hearing this year from studio insiders that he had been officially shelved. Jeff Grattis, Head of Games at Amazon, said: “Our creative team continues to explore an exciting new gaming experience that does justice to Tolkien’s world; We work closely with Middle-earth and remain excited about intellectual property. » It’s as close to a “yeah, that big old MMO is dead”, in terms of marketing.
THE New World The Amazon Games Orange County team began work publicly on the Lord of the Rings MMO in 2023. When the layoffs occurred two years later, Amazon said in a staff memo that it was withdrawing support for big-budget titles and particularly MMOs, but the company did not publicly name names. Around that time, a former senior gameplay engineer reportedly posted and then deleted a LinkedIn post alluding to the death of the Lord of the Rings MMO (while breaking our hearts even more): “This morning, I was part of the layoffs at Amazon Games alongside my incredibly talented peers on New World and our brand new Lord of the Rings game (you all would have loved it).”
Allegations of cancellation emerged this week as part of a Eurogamer investigating Amazon’s generative AI mandates and subsequent layoffs.
Amazon still has the right to create video games based on The Lord of the Rings and The Hobbit under its 2023 deal with Embracer Group, and it also produces The Rings of Power TV show based on the works of JRR Tolkien. Amazon recently announced the closure of Glowmade’s dungeon crawler King of Meat just six months after its launch, and it’s currently focused on simplifying Luna, its game streaming service, with the apparent aim of making Prime subscriptions more attractive.
Hopefully, the equation of (has LotR license) + (requires Luna content) + (is OK with AI in creative settings) it doesn’t lead to anything terrible here.
