The recent Amazon layoffs heavily affected its gaming division, and now a former developer’s LinkedIn post implies that the Lord of the Rings MMO in development has no one working on it and is likely cancelled.
The wording on the now-unavailable post by a former senior gameplay engineer doesn’t explicitly confirm cancellation, and Amazon hasn’t formally announced it—unlike how they announced New World will no longer receive updates. However, it’s understood that everyone, or at least most people working on the LOTR game, is no longer at Amazon due to being included in the 14,000 cuts announced last Tuesday.
This is the second time Amazon has failed to release this Lord of the Rings MMO. Back in 2021, after two years of development, the company announced the first cancellation shortly after Tencent acquired one of their partner developers in China, Leyou Technologies. Following this acquisition, Amazon claimed it couldn’t reach new terms with Tencent, and development had to be halted.
Two years later, in 2023, Amazon partnered with Embracer Group and Middle-earth Enterprises to recreate the Lord of the Rings game, now without Tencent’s influence. They were expecting an open-world MMO adventure to finally release without external interference. But Amazon couldn’t survive its own challenges. This week, after another two-year cycle, the future of Lord of the Rings looks bleak.
It’s interesting how every major news about this game follows a two-year cycle: first announcement in 2019, cancellation in 2021, new development in 2023, and a potential second cancellation in 2025. It’s unclear if this reflects some bi-annual cycle within Amazon, but it hints that if the company ever wants to reuse Lord of the Rings assets, we’ll probably only hear about it two years from now.
We’re still waiting for Amazon to officially confirm or deny this cancellation. But it looks grim for what could have been an MMO based on a massively successful franchise that might have elevated Amazon Games to a big developer status.
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