Amazon Has Seemingly Cancelled Its ‘Lord of the Rings’ MMO

Amazon seem to have cancelled its Lord of the Rings MMO, according to a now-former senior gameplay engineer at Amazon Games. The cancellation follows the tech company’s mass layoffs, which have affected 14,000 jobs.

Amazon have seemingly cancelled its Lord of the Rings massively multiplayer online game (MMO) following the massive layoffs which have affected 14,000 jobs at the company.

According to Bloomberg, the tech company announced its intention to lay off a number of its employees yesterday after sending an email to staff confirming that it needed to make “organisational changes” which would impact its gaming division. 

Following the layoffs, Amazon Games announced that it would cease support for its breakout MMO New World, which just celebrated its fourth year and recently released its Nighthaven patch. Amazon will keep monetisation active and continue to sell its recent Aeternum expansion despite promising no new content would reach the game. 

The company will also keep the servers live through 2026, and has promised they’ll give six months’ notice before making any changes that render the game unplayable.

Amazon’s Vice President of Audio, Twitch and Games, Steve Boom, would confirm the company’s new strategy to pivot away from live-service games and instead invest more in its Luna cloud gaming service in a company-wide memo.

Fans were already anxious about the game’s future as news broke out about the layoffs, and now, one former Amazon employee seems to have confirmed its cancellation.

The update comes from former Amazon Games engineer Ashleigh Amrine, who announced that she had lost her job on LinkedIn yesterday: “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.

Amazon and Lord of the Rings rights holders Embracer have yet to officially confirm that the game is dead, but it would be hard to imagine the game continuing development given the layoffs and commitment to move away from MMOs.

The Amazon-led Lord of the Rings MMO was first announced in 2023, after the company had partnered with Embracer Group, who own Middle-earth’s rights. The game would be described as a “persistent open-world adventure” that would span events from The Hobbit through The Lord of the Rings. Details about the game remained scarce throughout its development, and if the rumours are true, the MMO will be shuttered before any new information can reach the public.

While The Lord of the Rings MMO was announced in 2023, Amazon Games Boss Christoph Hartmann told IGN last year that the game was still in early development: “We’re still trying to find the hook, find that idea of what it is because we don’t just want to go and do the same thing over,” Hartmann said at the time.

“While it’s tempting sometimes with an existing IP, that’s not the point of doing it. You’ve got to find a fresh twist, and we’re still, I think, in that period where we really want to find out what could be the hook, what could be the thing which is different to all the other games out there. So it’s a little bit early.”

Either way, it’s looking like we won’t get that massively expanded Middle-earth experience like we had hoped any time soon.