Amazon: Even more profits, but also layoffs in the video game

Gaming News Amazon: Even more profits, but also layoffs in the video game

100 fewer employees for Amazon’s video game division

Whether you’ve played one of their games or are simply taking advantage of Prime Gaming benefits that are offered with the Amazon Prime subscription, you surely already know that the Jeff Bezos company has a video games division. Soberly called Amazon Games, the latter has not been spared from the parent company’s planned layoffs worldwide.

In fact, earlier this year it announced plans to lay off as many as 9,000 employees, adding to the 9,000 others Amazon has already hired.

Although most of those affected by this decision obviously do not belong to the company’s gaming division, it will have to lay off a hundred employees in the coming weeks. In addition to some general employees of Amazon Games, these also include members of the San Diego development studio and employees of the Prime Gaming department.

The news came last Tuesday when employees received an explanatory memo from Christoph Hartmann, vice president of Amazon Games. In the latter we can read, for example, that the company maintains the will to “to become one of the largest publishers of quality video game content

“and that it counts”invest in internal development“. We also learn that the Montreal development studio is set to expand further and that it is moving forward on a yet-to-be-announced project. The San Diego studio, meanwhile, is expected to accelerate the pre-production phase of its own game, again unannounced to the public.

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Games with mixed success

If Amazon seems ready to restructure its costs to get back to the top of the video game publishing market, they have yet to prove to the world that they can do it. In fact, since its inception in 2013, the Amazon Games group only shone with two different and very current titles: the MMORPG New World and the Hack’n’Slash Lost Ark.

If you’re certainly not unfamiliar with these names since their respective launches have gone well, let’s not forget that their success hasn’t really held up over time. If we look at the Steam stats of the two titles published by Amazon Games, we can quickly see that while they each amassed an average of 1 million players upon their release, players seem to have abandoned them for a while. As of early April this year, Lost Ark only has 100,000 players. New World, on the other hand, hovers between 20,000 and 30,000 players, a phenomenal drop compared to the buzz it generated upon its release. Whether the next games from Amazon Games can convince players to stay a little longer remains to be seen.