Amazon Games Lays Off 100 Employees, But Most Studios Will Grow

mmorpg.com:

Amazon Games has laid off about 100 employees working for Amazon Games, according to a new report, but the company’s studios working on New World and an unannounced project will continue to grow.

The report, from Bloomberg, cites an internal memo sent to employees from Christoph Hartmann, Amazon Games’ Vice President. According to Hartmann, “Going forward, we will continue to invest in our internal development efforts, and our teams will continue to grow as our projects progress”. 

The layoffs affect “workers at Prime Gaming, Game Growth and the company’s San Diego studio,” according to the report. Amazon Games is working on two unannounced projects in San Diego and Montreal. For the project in the San Diego office Hartmann says that they will “double down on the pre-production phase”. The Montreal studio will “continue to expand”.

Amazon has been cutting back significantly, having laid off over 27,000 employees over the past several months. Losing 100 people across the Games division is comparatively small, though it depends on where the cuts were. Several hundred people were also laid off at Amazon-owned Twitch recently.

The New World team will continue to grow, according to Hartmann. New World just released its first new season in its shift to a quarterly content model. It remains Amazon’s so far only internally developed and released game. While declarations of continued growth sound optimistic for the Irvine, CA-based New World team.

So, while there are some cuts, most of the teams we know are active on projects are referred to as growing or expanding. Amazon Games has also gone into publishing, successfully publishing Smilegate RPG’s Lost Ark and has publishing deals for anticipated games like Bandai