A while back, Amazon had announced that they would start working on their own gaming development. This included creating their own games, one of which being an MMO known as New World, which had sign-ups for the alpha a bit more than half year ago. There was another title that they had revealed as well which was Crucible, and these two games would be the first of their Amazon Gaming Studios. Which, aside from the alpha sign-ups, the studio hasn’t brought much else forward for its progress.
However, while the hype of E3 ending, and everything that had been announced during it, Amazon had quietly slipped the pink slip to several of their Gaming Studios’ employees. Employees were told Thursday morning that they had 60 days to find another position within Amazon, and if they couldn’t obtain a new position after that eloted time, they would receive severance packages. There wasn’t any information on how many employees were being let go, but a statement was released from an Amazon spokesperson about the situation:
Amazon Game Studios is reorganizing some of our teams to allow us to prioritize development of New World, Crucible, and new unannounced projects we’re excited to reveal in the future. These moves are the result of regular business planning cycles where we align resources to match evolving, long-range priorities. We’re working closely with all employees affected by these changes to assist them in finding new roles within Amazon. Amazon is deeply committed to games and continues to invest heavily in Amazon Game Studios, Twitch, Twitch Prime, AWS, our retail businesses, and other areas within Amazon.
With this statement, it was also revealed that there had been some unannounced games that had been canceled during this lay-off of employees. However, with the focus now on New World, and Crucible as well as the unannounced games that they’re still allegedly working on, Amazon Games Studios is still working, just with a smaller team.