After gutting 14,000 employees and much of its game division earlier this week, Amazon has quietly sealed the fate of its biggest fantasy gamble yet. The tech giant didn’t just put New World on life support; its long-rumored Lord of the Rings MMO is also reportedly shelved. And in true tech trend fashion, Amazon’s next epic isn’t about elves or orcs — it’s about Gen AI.
Former Amazon Games MMO devs from the Irvine and San Diego studios have been saying their goodbyes across social media. Some changed their status to ‘Open to Work’ while others post nostalgic New World screenshots. One of them is senior gameplay engineer Ashleigh Amrine, who wrote on X, “Bittersweet doesn’t even begin to cover it. I’m so deeply proud of what we built and the incredible team that brought Aeternum to life.”
But that wasn’t all she had to share. Spotted by Eurogamer, Amrine’s LinkedIn post confirmed that Amazon’s unnamed Lord of the Rings MMO had also been scrapped.
“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).”
Both her post and LinkedIn profile have since disappeared, though her X account remains public.
Ex-Mythic Entertainment developer Scott ‘Lum the Mad’ Jennings piled on the news over on Bluesky, writing, “New World either goes on maintenance mode or is passed off to a third party (probably the former) and the LOTR Hot Shelob game is gone,” referring to the meme that came from Shadow of War.
“[…] you don’t ‘halt a significant part’ of game and especially MMO development, it’s binary. you do or you don’t.”
At the time of writing, Amazon hasn’t officially confirmed anything. But if the new Lord of the Rings MMO really is no more, this would be the second time it has fumbled its journey to Middle-earth. The company once aimed to rival the long-running LOTR Online, with VP Christoph Hartmann proudly talking about ‘bending the rules’ of Tolkien canon. However, Amazon’s own ended up scrapped in 2020 following a dispute with Tencent before it saw the light of day.
In what one might call a disturbing irony, though, Amazon quietly posted two new job openings just one day before the layoff news hit. One for a ‘Senior Technical Program Manager, AI Games‘ and another for a ‘Software Development Engineer, Luna Gen AI.’ The roles describe building ‘innovative Gen AI games that unlock new types of gameplay,’ collaborating with AWS to create AI-powered tools.
