Amazon massively downsizes its gaming efforts in new round of lay-offs

For quite a few years now, Amazon has been dipping its toe back and forth into and out of the video games industry, with the retail giant having published and cancelled a ton of different games. Despite maintaining services such as Luna cloud streaming and Prime Gaming, Amazon is said to be massively downsizing its game development division.

In a report published by Bloomberg, Amazon announced a massive round of lay-offs affecting more than 14,000 people which includes “significant role reductions” in the video games department.

In a statement obtained by Bloomberg, the vice president of Audio; Twitch; and Games ‘Steve Bloom’ told staff:

“While we're proud of our successes in first-party AAA game development and publishing, we have made the difficult decision to halt a significant amount of our first-party AAA game development work – specifically around MMOs – within Amazon Game Studios, including making significant role reductions in our studios in Irvine and San Diego, as well as our central publishing team.”

All that said, Amazon made sure to note that they are still working on some titles, including the next Tomb Raider and Maverick Games’ upcoming racer, among others.

At this point, it’s clear that being a video game developer / publisher is rather tough, especially for companies whose main focus lies elsewhere. Hopefully all impacted developers are able to find new (and better, more stable) employment.

KitGuru says: What do you think of this latest announcement? Was Amazon ever going to succeed in the gaming space? Let us know down below.

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