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
Unity Technologies, a company behind very popular Unity game engine, hit the news again, but not for reasons you might expect. Yup, it looks like they became the new evil corporation on the horizon.
What always fascinated me in the books, movies or video games was the concept of an evil corporation. They always had some nefarious, although logical, plans, they were powerful, they were crushing people just for the fun of it. They were always over-the-top, always taking part in some evil plans, and always had some twisted individual in charge of them. But in real life...
Steam just took a stand against NFTs in the games available on the platform. Is this the first sign of getting back to normal?
It seems like the media in the gaming industry has still a lot to learn from the examples such as Cyberpunk 2077 and Anthem - hype is not everything. Why do I mention it? No, I’m not gonna talk about Cyberpunk 2077 again, some other title caught my attention and by pure coincidence it was a Polish game as well.
After almost 2 years of empty promises and pointless roadmaps that never materialized it looks like CD Projekt RED finally gave up on saving the dumpster fire that Cyberpunk 2077 was. I mean they put up another patch.
GSC Game World, the company behind Stalker 2: Heart of Chornobyl, just introduced a new game in the universum and at the same time they invented a new genre of the games. Or rather, meta games. Introducing Stalker 2: the Download Simulator!
While YouTube has its fair share of problems and stupidity involved in the process of "making it better", it looks like some of the youtubers just can’t help themselves and blame YouTube for somethi...
To finish this miserable year on more positive note single player online manager Santa Monica FC Online prepared a small Xmas present.
