Some years ago, Amazon paid an Erebor’s worth of gold for the rights to J.R.R. Tolkien’s Middle-earth film and TV rights. Around $1 billion in human money. In addition to feature films, this deal signaled Amazon would make up to six different television projects as well as perhaps its biggest undertaking, a massively multiplayer online roleplaying game (or MMORPG if ya nasty) set in the Lord of the Rings universe. Now we’re learning (via Collider) that Amazon Game Studios has officially cancelled that selfsame MMO. The news comes from former Amazon Games engineer Ashleigh Amrine, who shared on Linkedin:
“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).”
These layoffs are just part of the recent round of severance as part of Amazon’s company restructuring. A whopping 14,000 corporate positions across Amazon Game Studios, Twitch, and Audible got the axe. Steve Boom, head of the division that covers all of those things, said the following of the layoffs:
“Over the last several months, we’ve been evaluating our go-forward plans, specifically through the lens of our mission to deliver the very best gaming experiences to customers while leaning into the things that Amazon does best. While we’re proud of our successes in first-party AAA game development and publishing. We have made the difficult decision to halt a significant amount of our first-party AAA game development work — specifically around MMOs — within Amazon Game Studios.”
So what does that mean for Tolkien fans? As of now, not a lot. Amazon has as yet made only two of the promised five seasons of its modestly successful The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power television series. The most expensive show in history, TROP just recently wrapped filming of the third season.
Will we ever get another great LOTR game like 2014’s Middle-earth: Shadow of Mordor? Its follow-up, Shadow of War, came out in 2017. In 2023, we got two other, unrelated games. One, the mediocre survival game Return to Moria and the other, the legendarily terrible Gollum.
Kyle Anderson is the Senior Editor for Nerdist. He hosts the weekly pop culture deep-dive podcast Laser Focus. You can find his film and TV reviews here. Follow him on Letterboxd.
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The post Amazon Cancels LORD OF THE RINGS MMORPG Project appeared first on Nerdist.
This articles is written by : Nermeen Nabil Khear Abdelmalak
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