The last four years have been a long road for Christoph Hartmann. Since becoming Amazon Games CEO in late 2018, he has been witness to cancellations, layoffs, and rumors of internal clashes. In late 2021, the publisher was forced to cancel its Lord of the Rings MMO due to rights issues with Tencent.
Fast-forward to 2023, and Amazon Games mostly seems to be on the upswing. Lost Ark enjoyed a successful launch in 2022, a new Tomb Raider game is in development, and Amazon Games has struck publishing deals with numerous developers based primarily in Asia. Even Lord of the Rings is back from the dead, with Amazon announcing today that it has struck a deal with Embracer Group to fully reboot the nascent MMO in what Hartmann claims is the publisher’s most ambitious project to date.
“This is a completely new game because the license is much, much wider… Obviously, there’s nothing changing because we all know the world is set, the characters are set. It’s really the freedom we have in terms of gameplay features where now anything is possible and the limitation is where it’s technically possible or not,” Hartmann says. “Before, it was like, ‘It’s a good idea but we can’t do it because there’s something else going on.’ Now, the mission we are on, and the mission Embracer fully supports, Middle-earth Enterprises, fully supports, is to make the biggest best MMO out there based on Lord of the Rings. That’s our ambition.”
Amazon Games’ rollercoaster ride
It’s the latest peak in what has been a rollercoaster ride over the past decade. The studio was founded back in 2014, its initial hires including Kim Swift (Portal 2) and Clint Hocking (Far Cry 2). Its first three games were Breakaway, Crucible, and New World, two of which were canceled before or shortly after launch. New World found great success when it launched in 2021, but it stumbled due to bugs and patchy support.
Hartmann, who worked on the original Grand Theft Auto and helped create 2K Games, joined Amazon Games in 2018. A gregarious German born in what he describes as “very Sound of Music country,” Hartmann’s road to the games industry ran through BMG Music before joining Rockstar Games in 1995. He uses his experience to wave off the difficulties that Amazon has faced to this point, claiming that the rollercoaster is “more on the high side than on the low side.”
“Every game publisher is, at the beginning, on a rollercoaster,” he says. “Amazon tried to get a foot on the ground with games and I think it just took the approach more like a tech company rather than a games or entertainment company… When they brought me in for the first time, coming with deep experience and knowledge about the games industry, and also giving us the breathing space we needed, things got better.
He lists off some of the company’s recent accomplishments: partnering with Bandai Namco for Blue Protocol; striking a deal with NCSoft to publish Throne and Liberty, and signing an agreement to make the next Tomb Raider game. The newly-rebooted Lord of the Rings MMO, which will be developed by Amazon Games Orange County studio, best-known for its work on New World, will be its biggest undertaking yet.
“I want it to be the biggest MMO out there. That’s obviously good for us, but I think that’s also good for gamers because I think there’s still a market for people craving big MMOs,” Hartmann explains. “There haven’t been that many out there, and I think I wanted it to be the title that brings even more people into that genre, because the more people that play, the more people are to play with, and that’s really my dream and hope… to be the biggest MMO title out there.”
I want [Lord of the Rings] to be the biggest MMO out there
It hasn’t been an easy road getting to this point. The original project was under development by Leyou, a Hong Kong-based game developer, but when Leyou was sold to Tencent in 2021, negotiations quickly fell apart and Amazon Games opted to walk away. Luckily for Amazon, the Embracer Group purchased Middle-earth Enterprises the next year and was amenable to making a deal.
“We are very friendly with Embracer,” Harmann says. “We already have the Tomb Raider deal with them. I know tons of people there and I called them up… I didn’t expect anything, but I thought I might as well ask. And actually they were very interested. People know that Amazon really care about quality and don’t want to ship a game until it’s ready, and that we think big and really want to see things through.”
Heading into this project, Amazon Games Orange County’s previous work on New World will be under the microscope. From an early peak of more than 900,000 players, it suffered a steep decline, with the current playerbase now sitting at around 20,000 players on Steam. New World continues to be supported by Amazon Games, shifting to a seasonal model with a free and premium battle pass, but it has struggled to resuscitate its community.
Hartmann says that Amazon Games has learned “a lot” from this experience, noting that Amazon’s Orange County studio is still relatively new, having been formed out of Double Helix Games in 2014. In that light, he calls New World a “huge, huge achievement.”
“How many studios do you know who… with a new IP, with a completely new team, and their own tech, that actually made a game that big? Truthfully, being from the game industry, can you remember anyone else who have actually got there? I can’t, because when you look at all the big games, they all have it done two, three times before by the time something came out,” Hartmann says.
Pressed for what exactly the studio has learned from the experience, Hartmann says that “you cannot just prepare for launch, you need to literally prepare for the two years after.” In particular, he says that New World’s developers “weren’t prepared” for the game’s sudden surge in popularity at launch.
“You make best estimates and in retrospect, that’s the main lesson,” Hartmann admits. “If we would’ve been in a position where we could just pound the gaming community with more content, better content… not have any issues… we probably would have higher player retention now. People still like it. We just put the battle pass out, numbers went back up.”
Are there too many live service games?
For now, Hartmann and Amazon Games are looking to the future. While the publisher has mainly focused on PC to this point, Hartmann says that the next wave of releases will be on consoles as well.
“We’re going into the console market,” Hartmann says bluntly. “It just happened that our first two titles were on PC because they were already in development.”
Amazon also continues to focus disproportionately on live service games, a segment that has become increasingly crowded as publishers seek to replicate the success of Fortnite, Call of Duty, Destiny, Genshin Impact, and other major games. Blue Protocol, Throne and Liberty, and Lord of the Rings will all seek to cultivate dedicated audiences of their own, but if Hartmann is worried about tough competition, he isn’t showing it. The churn of the live service market, he says, with younger players coming in to replace older players, is sufficient to keep growing.
“I think it’s very important for us also to take risks. And that’s probably the biggest challenge for the games industry. It’s not that there’s enough or too many titles out there,” Hartmann says. “Are we willing to take the risk to try out new things? Because people want new things, and we know they’re big bets, but you have to keep on moving forward. And I think that’s the bigger risk than too many titles. Are we willing to take risks to do new things but really capture the minds of millions and millions of people to come?”
Looking ahead to Amazon’s Lord of the Rings MMO, Hartmann says the publisher’s main goal is to use the license to draw in fans who wouldn’t otherwise play MMOs.
“For me, getting a license should be the icing on the cake,” Harmann says. “The game by itself needs to be so good that everyone wants to play it… My target is not just to make a certain group of MMO players happy with the game, I want people who normally would not play an MMO saying, ‘Hey, maybe give it a try because I understand the content, it’s Lord of the Rings, I’ve never played an MMO.’… I definitely think we got to approach this from a much wider perspective than just being another MMO title. I want to make it very mass market competitive.”
In the meantime, Amazon Games’ rollercoaster rolls on.
“We just keep on climbing at a steady pace up the hill,” Harmann says. The question is, are we climbing up some small hill somewhere in the Austrian Alps, or are we going for Everest? I don’t know. There’s a bit of luck involved as well. It’s entertainment. But eventually, I see us climbing up more than going up and down.”
Photo credit: Amazon Games.
Kat Bailey is a Senior News Editor at IGN as well as co-host of Nintendo Voice Chat. Have a tip? Send her a DM at @the_katbot.
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