If anyone has the financial means and the synergies to shake up the video game market, it is Amazon. Despite great efforts, the gaming division of the global corporation has yet to land a sustainable hit. MeinMMO highlights past, present, and upcoming projects from Amazon Games.
The Amazon Game Studios has been around for a while. Since August 7, 2012, to be precise. A year earlier, the Amazon Appstore was already opened, and first developers were hired to work on mobile games. Indeed, a few smaller games like the social game “Living Classics” for Facebook and the mobile experience “The Unmaking” were released in the following years.
But that was only the beginning. On September 30, 2016, the people in charge revealed that they had bigger plans and wanted to invest much more energy and time into game development in the future. Amazon also had several announcements to underscore these ambitions:
- the MMORPG New World
- the 4vs4 “sport brawler” Breakaway
- the multiplayer survival sandbox shooter Crucible
What stands out immediately: The focus has been on service games from the very beginning, which can ideally build and retain communities for years.
[toc]
The cinematic trailer for New World from 2021:
All beginnings are hard
Today we know: Sentence with x. That was probably nothing. Breakaway never released and Crucible had such a catastrophic launch that Amazon sent the shooter back into beta, only to ultimately shut down the servers for good here as well.
That it looked significantly better for New World at launch, we certainly don’t need to tell you. 913,634 concurrent players on Steam(DB) is a historic figure, ranking it at number 11 in the all-time charts.
However, this number rather reflects how eager genre enthusiasts were in 2021 for a new, ambitious MMORPG from a Western studio. The last online RPGs of this nature came out in 2014 (Wildstar and The Elder Scrolls Online).
Additionally, the COVID-19 pandemic benefited many online games. Furthermore, Amazon excelled at utilizing its own Twitch synergies to build tremendous hype through various streamers and fuel it with great trailers. You can read more about it here:
The wrong genre for the entry into AAA?
Despite the strong start and the surely high revenues thanks to the Buy2Play model at launch, it’s hard to describe New World as a sustainable hit. Quickly, numerous problems of the online RPG came to light. Player numbers dropped faster than the popularity ratings of Friedrich Merz.
Although the expansion “Rise of the Angry Earth” in October 2023 and the Aeternum restart last year could each increase player numbers, it was only briefly. The two most recent seasons have hardly affected community size at all.
On Steam, there were only 10,000 concurrent players as recently as March 2025 (via steamdb.info). That’s a fraction of the then-peak.
The gameplay trailer for New World Aeternum:
The biggest problem of New World that still affects the quality of the game today: The developers made a devastating beginner’s mistake in their first major AAA project and changed the focus midway through production from survival and PvP to a theme park framework with quests, PvE challenges, and more story content.
However, the remaining time was too short to fill the vast world with enjoyable quests and to adapt all planned systems and content accordingly. Instead, there were cookie-cutter tasks. And PvE group content that didn’t fit well with the combat system. Overall, the content, systems, and mechanics resembled a wild patchwork quilt.
There were also many bugs. Fatal gold duplicate exploits, for example, which were fought with hotfixes that opened new exploit possibilities. In short: Although some developer veterans worked at Amazon Games, many mistakes were made that should not have happened.
Why did this happen? Well, developing an MMORPG is a different ball game than working on most other genres. Online RPGs are large, complex, and expensive.
Even experienced studios have only been able to launch smoothly and promptly trigger the content pipeline for regular content replenishment in exceptional cases – and they didn’t change the focus of the game midway through development. Amazon Games would have needed much more time to turn New World into a fully realized MMORPG after the switch.
It continues on the next page with the current balance as a developer, with the work as a publisher, and with future projects from Amazon Games.
- 1
- 2
