The managers of Amazon Games are pushing forward their strategic shift, soon they might not have anything to do with MMORPGs at all.
What is this strategic shift? With the sudden end of New World, the managers of Amazon Games announced a strategic shift in October 2025. They intend to reduce investments in large proprietary projects (especially MMORPGs) and instead focus on their own cloud gaming service Luna and the development of casual/AI-focused games.
The publisher role for Throne and Liberty and Lost Ark was to be continued. The measures were accompanied by extensive layoffs, with the MMORPG studio in Irvine reportedly being hit the hardest.
In January 2026, there was a change in leadership: Christoph Hartmann, who had driven the focus on MMORPGs as head of the Amazon Game Studios for years, left the company after the strategic shift. His position has not yet been filled one-to-one.
Regarding the MMORPG for Lord of the Rings announced in May 2023, Amazon Games had not commented at that time. The statement of a former senior developer suggested that even the ambitious project might have been canceled. She was certain that she would have loved the new Lord of the Rings MMO.
No statement, no entry, no MMORPG
What new hint is there? On the official game overview on amazongamesstudios.com the Middle-earth MMO was still listed until just a few weeks ago – as the Wayback Machine shows with the version of the page from February 19, 2026.
This was the last glimmer of hope that a genre and Lord of the Rings fan could point to: See, it’s still listed, it hasn’t been canceled! We also surfed the overview monthly to check: Is it still on the list?
Last weekend it happened: Looking at the MMORPG talk at CAGGTUS 2026, we passed by the game overview of Amazon Games again and saw … no MMORPG for Lord of the Rings. The open-world racing game that was to be developed in collaboration with Maverick Games has also disappeared.
Instead, in addition to the two Tomb Raider projects, Throne and Liberty, Lost Ark, and AI-judge Snoop Dogg, there’s now a new deck-building game for the Masters of the Universe universe (you know, by the power of Grayskull!), which is set to release on June 5, 2026, for Luna.
No official statement from Amazon Games regarding the cancellation of the Lord of the Rings project was provided in the course of the adjustment of the overview.
The MMORPG department is shutting down
What else is happening at Amazon Games? From the outside, it seems that Amazon Games wants to completely part ways with the MMORPG genre at the latest with the shutdown of the New World servers on January 31, 2027:
- With Henry and Roxx, the Lost Ark team lost two key pillars in March 2026, who had been important faces and points of contact for the community over the past years.
- Also in March, Globalization Design Manager Daniel “Tico” Lafuente, the face of Throne and Liberty, left the Amazon Game Studios. He is now working as Director of Product Management for NCSoft.
Both personnel changes show that Amazon Games is gradually scaling back its publishing responsibilities for Throne and Liberty as well as Lost Ark. We wouldn’t be surprised if they return these responsibilities to the respective developers at NCSoft and Smilegate in the coming months to completely leave behind the MMORPG topic by 2027.
Additionally, it fits that NCSoft wants to take care of the publishing for Aion 2 in the West itself. It also seems questionable whether Amazon Games will still play a role in the AAA games industry after the two current Tomb Raider projects. Already now, the company’s balance sheet is catastrophic: Amazon wanted to be a big player in games – The end of New World completes a sad story of failure
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