5 reasons why Amazon Game Studios, which released “New World”, has been struggling until now

This is Nakauchi from the technical sales department.

“New World” has finally been released.
The original release schedule was May 2020, but it was postponed four times and now it will be released on September 28, 2021!

Since the first day, there have been over 700,000 simultaneous connections. It's going well~

What is New World?

It's an MMORPG, and it's a one-time purchase model rather than a subscription.
However, Japanese is not supported and the server is not located in Asia.
Therefore, it may take some time to connect due to distance issues.
The game engine is Lumberyard, an in-house engine.As
an aside, Lumberyard will be renamed "Open 3D Engine" and will be made open source.

Amazon Game Studios continues to struggle

However, I think everyone knows that Amazon Game Studios has been struggling since its establishment in 2012.

Christoph Hartmann, current VP (Vice President) of Amazon Game Studios, has acknowledged his past mistakes.
I'm not saying this on my own.

Reason for struggle

1. The person in charge is inexperienced with games.

Mr. Mike Frazzini, the person in charge, will be in charge when Amazon Game Studios starts, but
at that point Mr. Frazzini was inexperienced with games and was a manager of the book business before being in charge of the game business.
So why was Mr. Frazzini, an inexperienced person, put in charge?
Amazon's common sense is that if you can run one business, you can run another.

2. The big names we brought in are leaving one after another.

Kim Swift (Designer of Puzzle Game Portal)
Clint Hocking (Director of Far Cry 2)
Richard Hillman (Madden guru)
Mark Whitten (Former Xbox Live boss)

There's no one left.

3. Too expensive problem

Amazon reportedly spends $500 million a year on its gaming division.
It is approximately 55 billion Japanese yen. As expected from Amazon

4. Development titles are shelved or discontinued one after another

Crucible
Released in May 2020 (service ends in 5 months)
Amazon's first title and basically free online battle game

"Lord of the Rings" MMORPG
to be shelved due to failure to agree terms with Tencent

BreakawayDevelopment
was discontinued because it did not reach the quality we expected.

5. Amazon's culture is not suitable for game development

Accusations from former employees:
``The company ran on data, and employees were required to produce six-page documents to sign off on major decisions.''

"The game engine required developers to use Lumberyard, their own engine, rather than Unreal Engine or Unity. As a result, some functions required arcane commands, making the system extremely slow, and developers were forced to use Lumberyard to process art and code. While I was waiting for it to compile, I played games and watched Amazon Prime Video.

"There were whispers within the company that Lumberyard was ruining Amazon Game Studios."

However, there is no way Amazon will end like this!

Amazon has a lot of money and the world's largest infrastructure, AWS.
In addition, we will start distributing the Korean MMORPG "LostArk" in North America and Europe in 2022.
I feel that the day will not be far in the future when Amazon, which has been successful in latecomers such as e-commerce, cloud, and streaming, will succeed in the game industry as well.

Reference site
https://www.gamesindustry.biz/articles/2021-09-22-amazon-games-christoph-hartmann-eventually-well-be-judged-by-our-successes
https://www.bloomberg.com /news/features/2021-01-29/amazon-game-studios-struggles-to-find-a-hit
https://www.bloombergquint.com/business/amazon-drops-company-policies-on-game- development-after-backlash