Amazon has made no secret of its desire to become a major player in the video game industry, investing heavily in game development and even launching its own gaming platform called Luna. But despite this and seemingly endless resources, things haven’t really taken off for them.
Major projects have been shut down, such as Crucible (which disappeared just months after its premiere) and at least one Lord of the Rings role-playing game, where work on one was halted in 2021, and there are rumors that work on another announced in 2023 has also been stopped after a large number of people from the team were laid off last fall. Entire teams have also been shut down, and just last month Ubisoft bought developer March of Giants from Amazon.
Now there is another sign that something is not quite right. Christoph Hartmann, co-founder of 2K Games and responsible for several of the publisher’s top titles, has been Amazon’s gaming director since 2018. “Has” is a key word in this context, because Bloomberg journalist Jason Schreier is now reporting via Bluesky that Hartmann has resigned.
We don’t yet know who will take over, but it’s clear that Amazon no longer seems interested in so-called AAA games and will henceforth focus increasingly on smaller cloud projects for its Luna gaming service.
