Bad luck seems to continue to plague Amazon’s incursions into the gaming space. The Twitch owner has canceled The Lord of the Rings online role-playing game announced in 2019.
Amazon Game Studios had been developing the title alongside the China-based Athlon Games owned by Leyou. In December 2020, Leyou was acquired by Tencent. Apparently, Amazon and Tencent failed to agree on the terms for project. And thus, The Lord of the Rings MMORPG bit the dust.
In the words of an anonymous Amazon spokesperson, “we have been unable to secure terms to proceed with this title at this time.”
The team that has worked on the game at Amazon will be moved to other projects. No information is avaiable on how the cancellation has affected Athlon Games.
That makes it the third cancellation from Amazon’s gaming department. In 2018, the company killed off competitive brawler Breakaway. Last year, Amazon pulled the plug on Crucible, a sci-fi free-to-play multiplayer shooter that had been in development since 2014. MMORPG New World remains in development, but has been pushed back several times.