Amazon Games

Amazon Games (formerly Amazon Game Studios until 2020) is an American video game developer and division of the online retailing company Amazon that focuses on the development of video games.
History.
In 2011, Amazon opened the Amazon Appstore and started to hire developers for mobile social games. In 2012, Amazon Game Studios released Living Classics, a social game for Facebook.
Amazon first announced that it would create computer games in 2014. Amazon recruited Kim Swift ("Portal", who has since left for EA), Clint Hocking ("Far Cry 2"), and developers who previously worked on "System Shock 2". Amazon sought to make games in-between the industry standards of small and large teams making casual and AAA games, respectively. Amazon Game Studios wanted to make teams of five to thirty people who would work on games for between a year and 18 months with a focus on "creativity" and "craftsmanship", whether the genre is for kids or hardcore gamers. Studio vice-president Mike Frazzini wanted to make projects like "Minecraft", "The Walking Dead", and "The Room". The studio also wanted developers to impact the direction of their hardware, between its cloud services and Amazon-brand devices. For example, developers can offload processing to Amazon's cloud services and the Amazon Fire TV has expanded memory as a result of developer feedback. A lot of the company's developers left within a year of the company's founding. Amazon Game Studios went on to publish a number of mobile titles, including the horror game "Lost Within".
Two years after the studio's initial announcement, at the September 2016 TwitchCon, the studio revealed its first three PC games: "Breakaway", "Crucible", and "New World". "Breakaway" was a team-based brawler in which two teams of four fight to deliver a ball to their opponents' goal. It was designed for tight integration into Twitch, the streaming service Amazon acquired in 2014. Amazon Game Studios announced the cancellation of "Breakaway" in March 2018. "Crucible" is a 12-player, class-based game in which players form alliances to become the last man standing. An additional player will direct the game, letting viewers interact with the game's elements and triggering in-game events. "New World" is a massively multiplayer sandbox game with a supernatural colonial America theme. Players can form settlements, fight each other, or fight monsters out in the world. Crucible launched on May 20, 2020, while New World releases sometime in 2021 after a 2nd pushback date was announced on July 10, 2020.
In August 2018, Christoph Hartmann, co-founder of video game publisher 2K Games – a wholly subsidiary of Take-Two Interactive – became the new Vice President of Amazon Game Studios working under Mike Frazzini.
The company has three game development studios in San Diego, Seattle, and Orange County.
In June 2019, during E3 week it was announced that layoffs hit the company. At this time it is unknown how many people were impacted. However, "multiple" unannounced projects had been cancelled.
The company had been involved with a "Lord of the Rings" MMO with Leyou since the middle of 2019. However, in April 2021, following Tencent's purchase of Leyou in December 2020, contractual disputes between Amazon and Tencent led Amazon to cancel further development of the game.
In March 2021, Amazon opened a new development studio in Montreal, Quebec, led by former members of Ubisoft Montreal behind "", Luc Bouchard, Xavier Marquis, Alexandre Remy, and Romain Rimokh.