On Tuesday of this week, Amazon laid off approximately 100 employees across its gaming division according to CNBC. These layoffs occurred across multiple sections of their overall gaming division, hitting their Game Growth group, Amazon’s San Diego gaming studio and Prime Gaming. Furthermore, while some members were laid off, other staff members have been reassigned to different projects that are more in line with Amazon’s present goals.
It is important to note that Amazon Games has not had a strong set of releases over the past ten years since its launch. This does not mean they have not been publishing titles, the problem lies with the projects themselves not quite reaching the standards set for them. This can be seen in a couple examples, those being their first big-budget game, Crucible, and one of their most recent games, Lost Ark.
Crucible was released in 2020 marketed as a new online third-person shooter to catapult Amazon into the gaming market. Unfortunately, according to Geekwire, the game had a plethora of problems including lukewarm reviews, a poor pricing model and server issues. They decided to pull the game off shelves a little over a month after the game was released, putting it back into closed-beta, before ultimately pulling the plug on the game a couple months after that.
Lost Ark on the other hand has had a better history than its predecessor, and is one of Amazon Gaming’s biggest hits. Techspot states that on release, Lost Ark attained over 1 million concurrent players in less than 48 hours, becoming one of Steam’s most popular games for February 2022. However as time passed, the game seemed to lose substantial amount of its player base. Steamcharts notes that the average player base has dropped by almost 87% since its release a little over a year ago.
This is all to say that the company has had a hard time releasing games that have made a notable impact on the gaming market, which seems to be a part of the cause for the recent job cuts. With their recent release of New World’s season 1, only time will tell if Amazon Gaming will be able to head in a more positive direction.