Amazon Games Over: Company Lays Off Hundreds of Game Division Employees and Cancels Big-Budget Projects

Unfortunately, the information about the massive layoffs at Amazon has been confirmed, although according to Bloomberg, 14,000 people will lose their jobs instead of the 30,000 reported by Reuters.

We reported that layoffs will occur in many Amazon divisions, including logistics, payment systems, gaming, and cloud services, but it seems the gaming direction will be almost completely eliminated.

What is known

Bloomberg published an internal letter sent to Amazon Games employees stating that the company is suspending a significant portion of its work on big-budget games, especially in the MMO genre. As a result, hundreds of developers will lose their jobs.

Although we are proud of our achievements in developing and publishing our own AAA games, we have made the difficult decision to suspend a significant portion of our work on AAA projects, especially MMOs.

Shortly thereafter, the company announced it would be ending content support for the MMORPG New World, whose servers will continue to operate until at least the end of 2026.

As a thank you to the audience, Amazon Games made the Nighthaven update and the Rise of the Angry Earth expansion free to all players.

Recall, Amazon was supposed to be the publisher of the new Tomb Raider installment and a big-budget MMORPG based on "The Lord of the Rings", and now the fate of Tomb Raider, which is handled by Crystal Dynamics, remains unknown, while the MMORPG, as mentioned above, is definitively abandoned by Amazon. It is possible that the rights to publish the next Lara Croft game will be sold to another company.

Source: Bloomberg, New World website