Amazon's Lord of the Rings MMO Canceled

Amazon's The Lord of the Rings MMO seems to have been canceled due to deep cuts within the company's gaming division.

This week, Amazon confirmed it has stopped creating new content for its MMO, New World, as part of sweeping layoffs impacting 14,000 positions. According to Bloomberg, the reductions notably affected Amazon’s video game operations, rolling back development and cutting roles largely at its Irvine and San Diego studios. Bloomberg noted Amazon was particularly scaling back on MMO development.

That raised concerns about the fate of The Lord of the Rings MMO. Now, a former Amazon Games developer affected by the cuts has indicated that the project has indeed been shelved.

“This morning I was included in the Amazon Games layoffs, along with my highly talented colleagues on New World and our budding Lord of the Rings project (you all would have adored it),” the developer wrote in a now-deleted LinkedIn post.

“It’s always difficult to watch such a capable team experience something like this — I've been fortunate to collaborate with some of the most skilled, imaginative, and supportive developers I've ever encountered here.”

The comment, “you all would have adored it,” strongly implies the Lord of the Rings MMO is no longer moving forward. Neither Amazon nor Embracer, the rights holder for The Lord of the Rings, has responded to IGN’s request for comment.

Though the game was announced in 2023, Amazon Games head Christoph Hartman told IGN last August that development was still in early stages. "We're still searching for that unique hook, the defining concept, because we don't want to simply replicate what's been done before," Hartmann explained at the time.

"While it can be tempting with a well-known IP, that isn't the goal. You need to bring a novel perspective, and I believe we're still in that phase where we aim to identify what that standout element could be — the feature that sets it apart from every other game. So it's still quite early.”

In 2023, Embracer stated its intent to "exploit Lord of the Rings in a very significant way" by transforming it into “one of the world's most prominent gaming franchises.” Embracer acquired the rights to The Lord of the Rings and The Hobbit in August 2022, and soon after revealed plans to develop new games, films, and other content based on the iconic IP.

This is not Amazon's first cancellation of a Lord of the Rings MMO. In 2021, it halted a separate Lord of the Rings MMORPG, initially announced in 2019, following a contract disagreement with Tencent.