Amazon Kills Its Lord of the Rings MMO... Again
You’re not having déjà vu. Amazon has once again taken its shot at a Lord of the Rings MMO and once again, it has fallen into the fires of Mount Doom. This all comes as part of another wave of mass layoffs at the company.
The news broke yesterday, not from a corporate press release, but from a LinkedIn post by Ashleigh Amrine, a (now-former) senior gameplay engineer at Amazon Games.
"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)," she wrote.
That last line is the real gut punch. "Y'all would have loved it."
New World Also Gets the Axe
This isn't just about Middle-earth. Amrine's post confirms what many suspected: development on New World is also officially ceasing. This follows the recent Nighthaven update. It's all part of a "company-wide shift away from MMOs". A bit late for that realization, isn't it?
Amazon says they'll keep the New World servers running through 2026, but let's be real. It's a dead game walking.
A History of Doomed MMOs
This is, staggeringly, the second LOTR MMO that Amazon has managed to kill before it even launched. The first one, announced in 2019 as a team-up with Leyou, died a fiery death in 2021. That disaster was apparently due to a contract dispute after Tencent bought Leyou.
This new, now-also-dead attempt was only announced in 2023, this time with Embracer, the new owners of the Middle-earth rights. We barely knew anything about it, other than it was a "persistent open-world MMO" that would span the events of The Hobbit and the LOTR trilogy. And now we never will.
So, What Now, Frodo?
Amrine's post was a class act, praising her "skilled, creative, and kind" colleagues. But the bigger picture is grim, with reports claiming 14,000 people are being cut in Amazon's latest purge. Best of luck to everyone affected.
If you're absolutely desperate to wander around Middle-earth with other people, I guess The Lord of the Rings Online is still... there. That game's been trucking along for almost two decades. At least those hobbits finally made it to Mount Doom. That's more than Amazon's MMOs can say.