Amazon have cancelled their second attempt at a Lord Of The Rings MMO as part of recent mass layoffs, according to a now-former senior gameplay engineer at Amazon Games.
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. I’ve reached out to Amazon for comment.
Colonial fantasy New World has already been confirmed to be ceasing development, following the recent Nighthaven update, as part of a company-wide shift away from MMOs. Amazon will keep the servers warm through 2026, and say they’ll give six months notice before making any changes that render the game unplayable.
Amazon’s first LOTR MMO was a collaboration with Chinese company Leyou, announced in 2019. It met an unfortunate end in 2021 thanks to an apparent contractual dispute, after Leyou were acquired by Tencent. Amazon revealed the second LOTR MMO in 2023, after partnering with new Middle-earth rights-owner Embracer. They called it a “persistent open-world MMO adventure”, spanning the events of The Hobbit and the LOTR trilogy, but beyond that, we’ve never heard much about the project.
“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.”
It’s claimed that 14,000 people are losing their jobs as part of Amazon’s latest cuts. Best of luck to everybody affected. At the risk of being twee, here is an encouraging aside from the books: “in the end the Shadow was only a small and passing thing: there was light and high beauty for ever beyond its reach.”
If you’re desperate to roam Middle-earth in company, Standing Stone and Daybreak’s The Lord of the Rings Online is still trucking along with a small but steady audience, almost two decades since launch. The community’s recent doings include finally accomplishing a pilgrimage of desperately underlevelled hobbits to Mount Doom.
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