Amazon Kills Lord of the Rings MMO, Again

The handheld console manufacturer Amazon has reportedly cancelled its Lord of the Rings MMO, marking the second time the company has killed a major project set in Tolkien's world. Sources familiar with the project confirm the cancellation occurred shortly after layoffs last October that impacted Amazon Games division.

Jeff Gattis, Amazon's head of games, did not confirm or deny the cancellation but stated the company is developing a "new game experience" set in the Lord of the Rings universe. The statement reads like corporate damage control (which, honestly, it probably is).

"Our creative team continues to explore a compelling new game experience that does justice to Tolkien's world; we are working closely with Middle-earth Enterprises and remain excited about the IP," Gattis told GamesIndustry.biz.

This isn't the first time Amazon has stumbled with this IP. The company announced a Lord of the Rings MMO in 2019 in partnership with Leyou Technologies. That project was cancelled two years later following Tencent's acquisition of Leyou in 2020. In 2023, Amazon partnered with Embracer, owner of Middle-Earth Enterprises, to develop the Lord of the Rings MMO again.

Amazon Games Orange County, the studio behind New World, was leading development. New World is scheduled to go offline in January 2027. Sources said 1,000 developers began transitioning from New World to the Lord of the Rings project months before the layoffs, and the project was entering pre-production when the cuts happened.

The physical reality of this cancellation means developers who spent months building systems that will never ship. Imagine spending your Tuesday morning tweaking a quest system, only to find out by Friday that the entire project is dead. That's the human cost behind the corporate announcement.

An internal memo from Steve Boom, Amazon's vice president of audio, Twitch, and games, said the layoffs resulted from halting a significant amount of first-party game development, especially related to MMOs. Sources claimed the layoffs were due to an AI mandate introduced before the cuts. This included development on an internal project called Project Trident, which reportedly relies heavily on generative AI.

Gattis denied that AI was the reason for role reductions in the Games division, stating the changes were due to a "strategic shift in [Amazon's] business." "Great games are made by talented people and we think AI should expand what's possible," said Gattis.

"We remain focused on using these technologies thoughtfully and responsibly, always guided by the creativity and judgment of our teams. We're proud of what our teams are creating, and we look forward to sharing more of what they've been building soon."

IGN reported that the Lord of the Rings MMO was thought dead back in October, when Amazon confirmed it was walking away from making new content for New World amid huge layoffs affecting 14,000 roles at the company. According to a report by Bloomberg, these layoffs included "significant" cuts to Amazon's video game operation, which reduced development work mainly in its Irvine and San Diego offices.

A former Amazon Games developer hit by the cuts suggested The Lord of the Rings MMO was dead in a now-deleted post on LinkedIn. "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)," the developer wrote.

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. That was Christoph Hartmann's assessment from August 2024, before the layoffs hit.

In 2023, Lord of the Rings rights owner Embracer said it needed to be "exploiting Lord of the Rings in a very significant fashion" by turning it into "one of the biggest gaming franchises in the world." Embracer bought the rights to The Lord of the Rings and The Hobbit in August 2022 and announced plans to explore opportunities to create new games, movies, and more based on the famous intellectual property soon after.

The pattern is becoming clear. Amazon announced an MMO in 2019, cancelled it in 2021. Announced another in 2023, cancelled it in 2025. Meanwhile, Lord of the Rings Online continues running, built by Turbine and published by Perfect World Entertainment. The original MMO has been around since 2007 and still has an active player base.

What could the "new game experience" be? Perhaps it's the rumored The Lord of the Rings RPG from Kingdom Come: Deliverance developer Warhorse, which, it's worth pointing out, is owned by Embracer. That would make sense from a licensing perspective, though it raises questions about why Amazon would invest in a competitor's project.

The MMO genre is brutal. Budgets are massive, development cycles are brutal, and if it flops, that's an enormous amount of money gone to the sink. Especially when Lord of the Rings IP also doesn't help. The expectations are sky high, and you don't want to let it end up being another Gollum the MMO situation.

Why is it so difficult to get a fully open world Middle-Earth game off the ground? You make a narrative driven RPG in this world and it becomes one of the best selling games of the year. It's like how it took a ridiculously long time to deliver a Hogwarts game that people had been begging for for over a decade.

There must be thousands of developers wanting to make a game like that a reality who have the talent to execute it to its fullest potential but instead this franchise has been mismanaged to insane degrees. Shadow of Mordor, a tie-in movie game and Online are pretty much the only three unanimous hits in the last two decades.

People will say they want to go see the wide open plains of Rohan until they get there and realize there's nothing to do there because you can't just add a bunch of fantasy video game stuff and make it still feel like Lord of the Rings easily. That's the fundamental tension in adapting this IP.

Whether users actually pay for whatever Amazon decides to build next remains the real question. The company has spent billions on the IP, cancelled two MMOs, and now promises something "new." Time will tell if that means a mobile game or another ambitious project that gets killed before launch.

At this point, the only thing more reliable than Amazon's Lord of the Rings games is the fact that they won't be what you expect.

Artūras Malašauskas is an AI Systems Integrator with 20+ years of production-grade web engineering experience. He has designed, shipped, and scaled enterprise Python/PHP systems for logistics, SaaS, and public-sector clients. For the past year, he has focused exclusively on AI integrations: deploying open-source LLMs, building generative media pipelines (image, audio, video), and engineering multi-agent workflows for real production environments. His standard: reproducibility, security, cost-efficient inference—no vaporware. He documents and evaluates emerging AI tooling, separating verified capabilities from marketing noise. Technical editor at: muza-ai.eu, ai-verslas.lt, ai-naujinos.lt Connect on LinkedIn