Oh, and turns out New World, Amazon’s one reasonably-sized success in gaming, is shutting down in 2026, and development is ending imminently.
Seems like the only way companies can turn “AI” profitable is to do massive lay-offs to cut costs. Not because AI can actually take on those jobs that were cut, but because it’s a “good” excuse.
Awesome.
We like in the dumbest cyberpunk version of the future. Predatory capitalism but all the tech is vaporwave and it’s all just dumb dumb finance bros running the show.
If you wanna make it as a game dev, the trick is to not sign up with a major publisher (unless it’s like Larian or Devolver or something), because it’s only a matter of time before you get laid off or given some impossible demands to satiate the shareholders.
Lol at your “major publisher” list consisting of “company with one real success and company with no recent successful games”
I would argue but I get the feeling that your library consists of Call of Duty and Fortnite.
Never played call of duty. Played Fortnite on occasion with some folks but not since probably 2022 give or take.
But yes, I would agree epic and ea are “major”
If an Internet infrastructure giant can’t make MMOs work, I don’t see how these smaller MMO projects that keep popping up are going to, either. Greg Street also recently just talked about how his isn’t getting funding.
It’s too bad, I think SpaceCraft looks interesting but I don’t know if it’s going to make to 1.0, much less stick around.
Dont think this has anything to do with how their game was going. Either that or this was already planned since a couple of months ago. New world recently gained a lot more players according to steam stats so it makes no sense to quit it now. Feel sorry for the devs even if the game wasn’t for me (never played it).
Galetti also espoused the benefits of AI in her message to employees, and claimed the oft-criticized technology is already allowing companies like Amazon to “innovate much faster than ever before.” She suggested it’s important for the company to reduce its headcount in order to take advantage of the perceived opportunity presented by the tech.
This screams of, we need to cut heads so we can pretend to be innovating with AI somehow
Most likely, they are just hiding all the sunken AI investment that has returned nothing in terms of revenue
“Perceived opportunity presented”
Shareholders keep saying AI at me, so now I gotta do something. Sorry guys.
I legit laughed out loud at that. That is hilarious. Of course it’ll bite them in the ass, but in the short term it’s literally more important that AI look like it’s cutting job than actually cutting jobs
That’s almost as bad as Doug Herrington, head of Retail, saying they needed to fire people to keep costs low for customers.
The layoffs also hit Twitch which has had a notorious bot problem for years. So now they’re going to use bots to fight bots?
Honestly the best thing Amazon could do is just shut down twitch completely. It’s become a dumpster fire of its former self. It used to be about people playing games and now it’s about which streamer is sexually assaulting which other streamer and dudes putting shock collars on dogs.
i still dont get why people are so upset about shock collars on dogs. fuck hasan cuz he supports terrorists, but the shock collar thing aint somthing id hate him for
What? I don’t think he supports the US government or the IDF.
he literally played terrorist propaganda videos on his strema
Yep, frankly I am amazed Twitch still exists at this point, given how server demanding it is, and how it is s constsnt clusterfuck of incompetent messaging that regularly produces quite bad PR.
I very much would not be surprised if they went to some kind of ‘yeah you have to pay a monthly subscription to watch more than 5ish hours of streams in a month, and you also watch ads’ kind of model.
[including video games]
Is it good or bad? Does Amazon have something famous game-wise?
Mostly they bought or founded studios that didn’t produce a product. They bought the Killer Instinct devs, Double Helix, who mostly have now left and formed Quarter Up Games, working on the new Invincible Vs game. They put out a hero shooter called Crucible that launched and was quickly shut down. Their biggest success has been New World, which is a moderately successful MMO. They also forked CryEngine into Lumberyard, which found some favor in the market. Other than that, they’ve got some co-publishing deals, including for an upcoming Tomb Raider game, which may now be in jeopardy.
Its’s complicated, but basically, Amazon also spun off Lumberyard into the fully open source, O3DE engine.
I am not sure if they still hold any particular rights to anything exclusive to Lumberyard, but yeah, O3DE is basically Lumberyard from some years back, that got handed over to a non profit, and has since been developed by that non profit for… 5 ish years? More?
The other wild thing is that… somehow, Cloud Imperium / Chris Roberts of Star Citizen… also got a version of Lumberyard/Crytek, or something like that?.. Before Amazon then later spun it off as O3DE.
So… the crytek engine has very weird family tree, at this point.
Thanks for the rundown!
Sorry to double post but uh… Warframe.
Are they… still an actual independent studio, that just has a lot of partnerships with Amazon?
Or did they end up getting folded fully in?
I’m not gonna pretend like I give a damn about any other Amazon created/associated game, cuz I don’t.
I would say that this is a good moment as any to cancel your subscription to prime.
they had many people working in video games? Last I heard they were 99% outsourced contractors maintaining games like new world
Once again Gamers are the most oppressed class.
Is this the final step in enshittification?
Nowhere near it.
The “corporate roles” are likely a case of downsizing after building out infrastructure and policies/protocols. A LOT of companies are doing it these days. They staffed up for a project, finished (or pivoted) the project, and now have full time staff that they don’t actually need. And rather than work on new efforts they just look for an excuse to purge the because they know they can rehire for the next big push. Ironically, that is a model that had a LOT of use in video games in the days before DLC.
And the warehouse jobs (what this is to “distract” from) are about attempts at automation. Which… okay, it is really hard to do worse than the grossly incompetent, and yet STILL horrifically underpaid, staff they already have so that will probably actually be a net positive to consumers. Which will, in turn, result in rapidly hiring back that staff when the warehouses all collapse because they got an extra shipment of SD cards and had nowhere to store them.
This reminds me of the CG studios going bankrupt at the same time the movie they worked in incessantly is released.
Those are a related but still “acceptable” situation where they are contractors who are generally over leveraged to the point that a single missed deal is enough to kill them. Which is definitely not helped by (allegedly?) being told the contract is for 3 scenes, it getting bumped up to 5, and them not even getting the final versions of the costumes until a week before it needs to be turned in. And then getting told they can either deal with it or never work for totally not Marvel ever again.
Contract for, let’s say Ant Man 3, is done but they are already in the hole because of the resources they spent on that and having to turn down other movies and then they get told they won’t be getting the contract for Dr Strange 2 and to go fuck themselves. And, of course, the entire internet (especially the generative ai loving chuds at corridor digital) shit on their work because it is horrible and “looks like someone made it in an afternoon” which… they kind of did because they weren’t even allowed to know who the villain in that sequence was until a month before it was due.
Whereas what we are seeing more of, this year in particular, is effectively entire departments getting spun up for a project and then everyone laid off when it is done. Has cost and severance implications but it is how corporations are getting the kind of senior staff who don’t want the instability of contract work… more or less on contract work. Which is why this is still a big news story.
As it relates to gaming, no. This is a large company who thought they could muscle their way into a very competitive market and then found that they very much could not.
