News business Amazon Game Studios – A local ignorance reported by Bloomberg
Jason Schreier and Priya Anand, renowned journalists for Bloomberg Magazine, have struck again! This time around, they looked at the case of Amazon Game Studios to answer the question, “Why are Amazon Studios unsuccessful in the video game world?”
This poll apparently mirrors one of our articles published last November, where we explained the various reasons behind Amazon Game Studios’ failure. Amazon Studios opened in 2012 to capitalize on the video game industry storm. So, eight years later, the studio seems to be at the same point, trying hard to release the titles adopted by its makers. We think in particular of Crucible, a multiplayer title with a tragic fate that closed its servers after just five short months. The cause of all of this seemed to be the in-house Amazon engine called Lumberyard, which, like the Frostbite engine for Project Ragtag (the Star Wars game that was killed in Amy Hennig’s egg), is an ill-suited engine to run multiplayer and Multiplayer designs to develop competitive titles.
As a result (because Lumberyard isn’t designed for big online games, as the publisher says) Breakaway with this engine was like driving a train while the tracks were still being laid (…) “You’re still working on the problems of what it means having your own engine and maintaining it, ”said a developer who works at Amazon Game Studios, referring to a separate team responsible for Lumberyard. Extract from an article in the Wall Street Journal about Amazon’s setbacks in the joint venture
However, it seems that this isn’t the only problem Amazon Game Studios has faced since it opened, which brings us back to the investigative side of Bloomberg. According to this survey by Jason Schreier and Priya Anand Amazon decided to enter the world of video games without knowing the codes of this particularly complex industry. In fact, Mike Frazzini, president of Amazon Game Studios, had never made a video game himself.
On another occasion, says another developer, the team was shocked when Frazzini struggled to differentiate between highly polished conceptual imagery and live gameplay, a sign that he didn’t understand the technology. Excerpt from the Bloomberg article
To address this shortcoming, the president of the new studios had called for the best, bringing together electronic arts executives in particular, but also developers who had worked on EverQuest and Portal. According to about thirty employees interviewed by Bloomberg, Mike Frazzini wanted to introduce an Amazon design method that, unfortunately, is not suitable for creating a game. So in 2014 Mike Frazzini, ignoring the advice of the veterans in the middle, decided to develop the Lumberyard home engine so that he no longer had to pay royalties to other publishers. The article takes Epic Games and its Unreal Engine as an example.
Lumberyard has become a scarecrow in the office. Some functions required esoteric commands and the system was extremely slow. The developers played Halo or watched Amazon Prime Video while waiting for Lumberyard to process drafts or compile code. Excerpt from the Bloomberg article
According to various employees interviewed by Bloomberg What prevented Amazon Game Studios from entering the industry is that Mike Frazzini has always wanted to witness the wave of popular market productions like Fortnite or League of Legends instead of developing his own video game concept. As an example, the staff therefore show the existence of Project Nova, which was heavily inspired by the card game of the Riot Games title before its cancellation in 2017 and then by Project Intensity. The latter – taking up the concept of the Battle Royale of Epic Games, a concept that, as we recall, was worn to the bone – will suffer the same fate as Nova in 2019.
Ultimately, according to the various comments Bloomberg collected, the failure of Amazon Game Studios lies in the company’s president’s lack of knowledge of the environment and too much diversification. In just eight years, developers have tried everything: they have produced mobile titles, developed innovative blockbusters and copied competitive hits.
As a reminder, Amazon Game Studios is currently working on New World, a multiplayer role-playing game that should normally see the light of day in the summer of 2020 before being pushed back to spring 2021.
New World is overhauling its crafting and progression systems
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By Jerome Joffard, Writing from igamesnews.com
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