Formerly | Amazon Game Studios (2012–2020) |
---|---|
Company type | Division |
Founded | August 7, 2012 [1] |
Headquarters | , U.S. |
Key people |
|
Parent | Amazon |
Divisions | Amazon Games Orange County [4] [5] Amazon Lumberyard Amazon Games Montreal [6] Amazon Games San Diego Relentless Studios |
Website | amazongames |
Amazon Games (formerly Amazon Game Studios) is an American video game company and division of the online retailing company Amazon that primarily focuses on publishing video games developed within the company's development divisions.
In 2011, Amazon opened the Amazon Appstore [7] and started to hire developers for social mobile games. [8] In 2012, Amazon Game Studios released Living Classics, a social game for Facebook. [9] It published third-party games for the Fire Phone, like Lost Within and Til Morning's Light and To-Fu Fury. [10]
Amazon first announced that it would create computer games in 2014. [11] Amazon recruited Kim Swift ( Portal , who has since left for Microsoft Games Studios), Clint Hocking ( Far Cry 2 ), and developers who previously worked on System Shock 2 . Amazon sought to make games in-between the industry standards of small and large teams making casual and AAA games, respectively. Amazon Game Studios wanted to make teams of five to thirty people who would work on games for between a year and 18 months with a focus on "creativity" and "craftsmanship", whether the genre is for kids or hardcore gamers. Studio vice-president Mike Frazzini wanted to make projects like Minecraft , The Walking Dead , and The Room . The studio also wanted developers to impact the direction of their hardware, between its cloud services and Amazon-brand devices. For example, developers can offload processing to Amazon's cloud services and the Amazon Fire TV has expanded memory as a result of developer feedback. [12] A lot of the company's developers left within a year of the company's founding. Amazon Game Studios went on to publish a number of mobile titles, including the horror game Lost Within. [13]
Two years after the studio's initial announcement, at the September 2016 TwitchCon, the studio revealed its first three PC games: Breakaway , Crucible , and New World . [11] [14] Breakaway was a team-based brawler in which two teams of four fight to deliver a ball to their opponents' goal. It was designed for tight integration into Twitch, the streaming service Amazon acquired in 2014. [11] Amazon Game Studios announced the cancellation of Breakaway in March 2018. [15] Crucible was a 12-player, class-based game in which players competed to become the last man standing. Crucible was launched in May 2020, but also cancelled later that year, with Relentless Studios citing "inability to see a sustained future" as the cause. New World is a massively multiplayer sandbox game with a supernatural colonial America theme. Players can form settlements, fight each other, or fight monsters out in the world. [14] Crucible launched on May 20, 2020, while New World was released on September 28, 2021, after a 2nd pushback date was announced on July 10, 2020, and a 3rd on August 31, 2021. In August 2018, Christoph Hartmann, co-founder of video game publisher 2K Games – a wholly owned subsidiary of Take-Two Interactive – became the new Vice President of Amazon Game Studios working under Mike Frazzini.
In June 2019, during E3 week it was announced that layoffs hit the company. At this time it was unknown how many people were impacted. However, "multiple" unannounced projects had been cancelled. [16] The company had been involved with a The Lord of the Rings MMO with Leyou since the middle of 2019. [17] However, in April 2021, following Tencent's purchase of Leyou in December 2020, contractual disputes between Amazon and Tencent led Amazon to cancel further development of the game. [18]
The company has three game development studios in San Diego, [19] Seattle, [20] and Orange County. [21] [22] [23] In March 2021, Amazon opened a new development studio in Montreal, Quebec, led by former members of Ubisoft Montreal behind Rainbow Six: Siege , Luc Bouchard, Xavier Marquis, Alexandre Remy, and Romain Rimokh. [24] During a major leak of Twitch's source code in October 2021, it was revealed that Amazon Games was working on a competitor to Steam, codenamed "Vapor". [25] New World launched on September 28, 2021, reaching 707,000 concurrent players at its peak on launch day. [26]
Lost Ark is a massively multiplayer online action role-playing game (MMOARPG) developed by Tripod Studio and Smilegate's game development subsidiary Smilegate RPG. It was fully released in the Korean region on December 4, 2018. The game was also released in North America, South America, and Europe on February 11, 2022, by Amazon Games. Within twenty-four hours of release, it became the second most played game on Steam. [27]
On September 22, 2021, Amazon Games announced it will publish a new title from game developer Glowmade. Based in Guildford, England, Glowmade’s staff includes veterans of Lionhead Studios. This game for Amazon will be a new IP focusing on online cooperative play. [28] In March 2022, studio head Mike Frazzini stepped down. [29] In April 2023, Amazon Games VP Christoph Hartmann wrote a memo to staff about laying off roughly 100 employees across its video games division. [30] In November 2023, Amazon eliminated over 180 employees, resulting in the shuttering of the Crown Twitch channel and the closing of Amazon's Game Growth team in an effort to focus Prime Gaming benefits on free games. [31]
Year | Title | Developer(s) | Platform(s) |
---|---|---|---|
2010 | Airport Mania: First Flight | Reflexive Entertainment South Wind Games | Amazon Appstore |
2011 | Airport Mania 2: Wild Trips | ||
2012 | Air Patriots [32] | Reflexive Entertainment | |
Simplz: Zoo | |||
Lucky's Escape | |||
Living Classics [9] | Amazon Game Studios | ||
2014 | To-Fu Fury [33] | HotGen | Amazon Appstore, iOS App Store |
Tales From Deep Space [34] | Frontier Developments | Amazon Appstore | |
Sev Zero [35] | Amazon Game Studios | Amazon Appstore, Google Play, iOS App Store [35] | |
The Unmaking [36] | Amazon Appstore [36] | ||
2015 | Lost Within [37] | Human Head Studios | Amazon Appstore, iOS App Store [37] |
Til Morning's Light [38] | Amazon Game Studios WayForward [38] | Amazon Appstore | |
2018 | Dragon's Lair [39] | Amazon Game Studios Seattle | Twitch Extension |
2019 | The Grand Tour Game | Amazon Game Studios Seattle [40] | PlayStation 4, Xbox One |
2020 | Crucible | Relentless Studios [20] | Windows |
2021 | New World [41] | Amazon Games Orange County, Relentless Studios [42] | Windows |
2022 | Lost Ark | Smilegate RPG | Windows |
2024 | Blue Protocol | Bandai Namco Studios, Bandai Namco Online | Windows, PlayStation 5, Xbox Series X/S |
TBA | Throne and Liberty | NCSoft | Windows, PlayStation 5, Xbox Series X/S |
Untitled Tomb Raider project [43] | Crystal Dynamics | TBA | |
Unannounced project [44] | Glowmade | TBA | |
Unannounced project | Disruptive Games | Windows, PlayStation 4, PlayStation 5, Xbox One, Xbox Series X/S | |
Untitled The Lord of the Rings MMORPG [45] | Amazon Games Orange County | Windows, PlayStation 5, Xbox Series X/S | |
Untitled online story-driven role-playing game. [46] | Amazon Games | TBA |
Title | Developer(s) |
---|---|
Nova [47] | Amazon Game Studios |
Intensity [47] | |
Breakaway | Amazon Game Studios Orange County [48] |
Lord of the Rings MMO [49] | Amazon Game Studios |
Funcom Oslo AS is a Norwegian video game developer that specializes in online games. It is best known for the massively multiplayer online role-playing game (MMORPG) titles Conan Exiles, Age of Conan, Anarchy Online, The Secret World – and The Longest Journey series of adventure games. The company has offices in Oslo, Norway; North Carolina, US; Lisbon, Portugal; Bucharest, Romania; and Stockholm, Sweden. It also had offices in Beijing, Dublin, and Montreal previously. It is now owned by the Chinese media conglomerate Tencent.
Electronic Arts Inc. (EA) is an American video game company headquartered in Redwood City, California. Founded in May 1982 by former Apple employee Trip Hawkins, the company was a pioneer of the early home computer game industry and promoted the designers and programmers responsible for its games as "software artists". EA published numerous games and some productivity software for personal computers, all of which were developed by external individuals or groups until 1987's Skate or Die! The company shifted toward internal game studios, often through acquisitions, such as Distinctive Software becoming EA Canada in 1991.
Epic Games, Inc. is an American video game and software developer and publisher based in Cary, North Carolina. The company was founded by Tim Sweeney as Potomac Computer Systems in 1991, originally located in his parents' house in Potomac, Maryland. Following its first commercial video game release, ZZT (1991), the company became Epic MegaGames, Inc. in early 1992 and brought on Mark Rein, who has been its vice president since. After moving the headquarters to Cary in 1999, the studio changed its name to Epic Games.
Daybreak Game Company LLC is an American video game developer based in San Diego. The company was founded in December 1997 as Sony Online Entertainment, a subsidiary of Sony Computer Entertainment, but was spun off to an independent investor in February 2015 and renamed Daybreak Game Company. On December 1, 2020, Daybreak Game Company entered into an agreement to be acquired by Enad Global 7.
Obsidian Entertainment, Inc. is an American video game developer based in Irvine, California. It was founded in June 2003, shortly before the closure of Black Isle Studios, by ex-Black Isle employees Feargus Urquhart, Chris Avellone, Chris Parker, Darren Monahan, and Chris Jones.
EverQuest Next was a planned massively multiplayer online role-playing game (MMORPG), meant to be the successor to EverQuest, EverQuest Online Adventures and EverQuest II. The game was in development by the Daybreak Game Company, but the project was terminated in 2016.
Spacetime Studios (STS) is a games development studio, based in Austin, Texas. Founded in 2005 by a small group of PC MMO game developers. The start-up was created with the aim to create Sci-Fi MMOs for the PC market.
Twitch is an American video live-streaming service that focuses on video game live streaming, including broadcasts of esports competitions, in addition to offering music broadcasts, creative content, and "in real life" streams. Twitch is operated by Twitch Interactive, a subsidiary of Amazon.com, Inc. It was introduced in June 2011 as a spin-off of the general-interest streaming platform Justin.tv. Content on the site can be viewed either live or via video on demand. The games shown on Twitch's current homepage are listed according to audience preference and include genres such as real-time strategy games (RTS), fighting games, racing games, and first-person shooters.
The year 2015 saw releases of numerous video games as well as a follow-up to Nintendo's portable 3DS console, the New Nintendo 3DS. Top-rated games originally released in 2015 included Madden NFL 16, NBA 2K16, NBA Live 16, WWE 2K16, Metal Gear Solid V: The Phantom Pain, The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt, Bloodborne, Undertale, and Fallout 4. Sales of video games in 2015 reached $61 billion, according to analysis firm SuperData, an 8% increase from 2014. Of this, the largest sector was in computer game sales and subscription services, accounting for $32 billion. Mobile games revenues were at $25.1 billion, a 10% increase from 2014. Digital sales on consoles made up the remaining $4 billion.
Masthead Studios is a Bulgarian video game developer, founded in 2005, specializing in massively multiplayer online role-playing games. Their latest PC game developed and published was Soul Grabber, released on Steam in 2019.
Curse was a gaming company that managed the video game mod host CurseForge, wiki host Gamepedia, and the Curse Network of gaming community websites.
Amazon Lumberyard is a now-superseded freeware cross-platform game engine developed by Amazon and based on CryEngine, which was licensed from Crytek in 2015. In July 2021, Amazon and the Linux Foundation announced that parts of the engine would be used to create a new open source game engine called Open 3D Engine, which would replace it. A new Open 3D Foundation, run by the Linux Foundation, will manage the new engine, which will be licensed under the open source Apache 2.0 license. The new engine is reportedly partially based on Lumberyard but with many parts rewritten, and is considered a new engine.
Z1 Battle Royale is a battle royale game developed and published by Daybreak Game Company. The game's development began after the original H1Z1 was spun off into two separate projects in early 2016: H1Z1: Just Survive and H1Z1: King of the Kill. The games were further split as separate projects in October 2017, with Just Survive dropping the H1Z1 name, and King of the Kill becoming simply H1Z1.
Breakaway was a team-based, multiplayer brawler video game in development by Amazon Game Studios. The game was cancelled March 31, 2018.
New World is a massively multiplayer online role-playing game (MMORPG) developed by Amazon Games Orange County and published by Amazon Games released on September 28, 2021. The game was previously scheduled to release in May 2020 and subsequently August 2021, but was delayed until its worldwide release on September 28, 2021. Set in the mid-seventeenth century, players colonize a fictional land modeled after the Americas.
Athlon Games Inc. is an American video game publisher owned by Leyou and based in Los Angeles, California. Best known for acquiring a controlling stake in the successor to Telltale Games, while also publishing SNK's weapon-based fighting game Samurai Shodown outside of Japan and China in 2019. The company is currently set to co-publish The Wolf Among Us 2 with Telltale.
Relentless Studios is an American video game developer that is based in Seattle, Washington. The company is led by Louis Castle, most known for being the co-founder of development Westwood Studios. The studio is one of four game main development divisions under Amazon Games. The other three are based in San Diego, California, Orange County, California, and Montreal, Quebec. The studio is most known for releasing the PC title Crucible in May 2020. The game would remain in active service until it was closed in November of the same year.
Proletariat, Inc. is an American video game developer based in Boston, Massachusetts. Founded by Seth Sivak and former Zynga industry veterans in 2012.
Christoph Hartmann is a German-American video game executive and vice president of Amazon Games at Amazon. Before assuming leadership of Amazon Games in 2018, he was president and co-founder of video game publisher 2K.