Okay, so a while back, Amazon dropped a ton of money – like, over a billion dollars – to get the rights to make movies and TV shows based on Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings world. They even announced they were working on a huge online roleplaying game, a proper MMORPG, set in Middle-earth. It felt like a really big deal! But now, according to a report from Collider and a former Amazon engineer named Ashleigh Amrine on LinkedIn, they’ve officially cancelled that game. It’s pretty disappointing news, honestly.
This morning, I was affected by layoffs at Amazon Games, along with many other talented people who worked on New World and the new Lord of the Rings game. (It was a promising project, and I think people would have really enjoyed it.)
These job cuts are the latest in a series of layoffs happening as Amazon reorganizes its business. Around 14,000 corporate employees at Amazon Game Studios, Twitch, and Audible have lost their jobs. Steve Boom, who oversees these divisions, explained the situation by saying:
For the past few months, we’ve been reviewing our future plans, focusing on how to best deliver great games to players by using Amazon’s strengths. We’re proud of the high-quality games we’ve created ourselves, but we’ve made the tough decision to stop working on most of our large-scale, self-published games – particularly those designed as massive multiplayer online games – at Amazon Game Studios.
What does this news mean for fans of Tolkien’s work? Currently, not much will change. Amazon has only released two of the five seasons they initially planned for their TV series, The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power. While it was the most expensive show ever made, The Rings of Power (often called TROP) has just finished filming its third season.
Fans have been wondering if we’ll ever see another truly excellent Lord of the Rings game like 2014’s Middle-earth: Shadow of Mordor. While its sequel, Shadow of War, arrived in 2017, 2023 brought us two new, but disappointing, titles: the passable survival game Return to Moria and the widely criticized Gollum.
Kyle Anderson is a Senior Editor at TopMob and the host of the “Laser Focus” podcast, where he dives deep into pop culture. He also writes film and TV reviews, and you can find him on Letterboxd.
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2025-11-04 22:03