Amazon's LOTR MMO failed because the company just couldn't get on with Tencent

pcgamer.com:

What happens when you give one of the world's biggest licences to two of the world's biggest companies? One of them takes its ball and goes home, it turns out. When Amazon's Lord Of The Rings MMO was suddenly cancelled last year(opens in new tab), we were left wondering what it was that had caused the talks between Amazon and Tencent to break down after what felt like a significant amount of hype for the game.

In an interview with Gamespot(opens in new tab), Amazon Games president Christoph Hartmann revealed that the game's development got so complicated after the involvement of Tencent—the Chinese tech giant with investments all over the world(opens in new tab)—that Amazon decided it would rather drop the whole thing. Hartmann said the companies «maybe could have worked together» on a different project, but they were «too big as companies to really turn into partners» on the MMO. So Amazon walked.

Amazon's initial deal regarding its LOTR MMO was with the Hong Kong company Leyou, a firm that was practically microscopic compared to the gargantuan bulk of Amazon and Tencent. Things were proceeding relatively well until Tencent acquired Leyou(opens in new tab) in December of 2020. That put a spanner in the works: Middle-earth Enterprises—the LOTR rights holder—terminated the MMO's rights to the LOTR licence and made it necessary to hash out a new deal.

Negotiations dragged on, but it seems that Tencent and Amazon just couldn't come to terms on how the Tolkienian pie would be divided. Hartmann makes it sound like the disagreement stemmed from a dispute over which megacorporation would have control over the relevant rights. He mentions that a situation in which Tencent owned the licence and Amazon developed the game was not