UPDATE
A little over a month later and Amazon has announced that they have established a new studio within Montreal, Canada. Of course not a ton of information has been released yet about the studio and its next game outside of mentioning a few founding members such as Romain Rimokh who was the narrative director behind Tom Clancy’s Rainbow Six: Siege. It looks like the company is not backing down on delivering new and thrilling video game titles as they attempt to craft original AAA IPs.
Original Story…
Making video games is a massive challenge. There’s a ton of work that goes into them and if you’re looking to become a key player with a focus on delivering an AAA video game experience, then there’s a significant bump into the resources needed. As a result, some studios don’t tend to stay in business after a few misses.
For instance, it was just earlier this week that we got word of Google ending their internal game development studios for their Google Stadia platform. Instead of developing first-party games, they will instead put a focus on streaming other developers’ games. With Amazon already having a rough start in big PC video game development, there might have been some concern with fans on just where the company views game development in the foreseeable future.
This also became a hot topic when it was unveiled that the current CEO and founder of Amazon, Jeff Bezos, announced that he will be stepping down. Taking over his place will be Andy Jassy who recently commented on game development when he sent an email to staff. According to Bloomberg, the upcoming CEO is interested in seeing game development become a success even if it means that they didn’t make a big splash in the marketplace right away.
If you recall, Amazon’s first big PC video game was Crucible which came out on May 20, 2020 but didn’t last long before getting pulled back into closed beta within June of that year. From there, it was unveiled in October that the game development was discontinued leaving the title a big failure. Now the focus for Amazon Game Studios is the upcoming MMORPG title New World. That’s still slated to come out this year but we’re again waiting for an official launch date.
While the upcoming CEO is seemingly all for game development and having a presence in the industry, it should be really telling where Amazon stands in game development after New World finally hits the marketplace. Still, being Amazon, they certainly have the funds to back up projects even if they don’t become a major success.
Source: Bloomberg
Source Update: Amazon
