Amazon cutting thousands of corporate roles
Amazon cutting thousands of corporate roles
Oh, and turns out New World, Amazon's one reasonably-sized success in gaming, is shutting down in 2026, and development is ending imminently.
[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.
Thanks for the rundown!
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.
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.
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.
We're living in a neo-liberal's wet dream.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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).
They JUST released an expansion so they weren't expecting this. As a result they just made it free so people can play it before shutdown.
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.
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.
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
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
"Perceived opportunity presented"
Shareholders keep saying AI at me, so now I gotta do something. Sorry guys.
That’s almost as bad as Doug Herrington, head of Retail, saying they needed to fire people to keep costs low for customers.