Lord of the Rings MMORPG cancelled

Online games news Tedious Retro Gamer, 19-04-2021
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Lord of the Rings MMORPG game, that was suppose to premiere in 2021, has just been added to the growing list of titles in development and then abandoned by Amazon Games.

Amazon Games, after 8 years of existence, so far has very little to show for. All of their AAA projects have been cancelled or cancelled with prejudice (yes, I mean Crucible), with single exception in form of New World, a MMORPG game that will (most likely) be released at the end of August 2021.

Lord of the Rings MMORPG game, which was announced in 2019, was suppose to be part of the larger project, accompanied with Lord of the Rings TV series, still being produced by Amazon Video. While the TV series is well overdue and breaks records of production costs, so far very little is actually known about details. The MMO game would be a perfect way to build symbiosis between films and video games, but right now it seems it will never happen.

It is hard to blame just Amazon Games for the cancellation of the game, Chinese studio Leyou that was working on the project, was acquired by Chinese giant Tencent in December 2020, which lead to dispute about the rights to the project and eventually to the cancellation. However if you add such titles as Nova, Crucible, Intensity and Breakaway, all of which were in development and then cancelled, it adds to rather grim outlook of Amazon Games.

There are rumours that Mike Frazzini, in charge of Amazon Games, has no experience, nor vision how, to successfully make a good and just blindingly follows trends that he reads in magazines. If it is true, it’s hard to tell, but retail giant has a history of making half-hearted efforts in new fields of their business: Amazon Video, Amazon Music, Audible spring to mind. They do exist, they (I guess) make some money, but all of them are light years behind their competition and they do not seem to mind.

19-04-2021