Is Amazon finding its way in games? | Sarah Anderson interview
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Amazon hasn’t had the easiest time in games. A decade ago, it formed Amazon Games. It made some big bets, hired a lot of game veterans as studio leaders and built a lot of teams in the past decade. Then it either didn’t launch the games, or they were released and became flops.
Amazon Games leader Mike Frazzini resigned in March 2022. Christoph Hartmann, who joined Amazon in 2018, began to centralize what was previously a collection of game projects that were more like their own separate businesses.
Amazon’s Orange County team managed to get the New World massively multiplayer online game out the door. It did well at first, then saw declines. Amazon updated the game regularly and turned around the numbers, said Sarah Anderson, head of marketing at Amazon Games. I spoke with her at last week’s Dice Summit in Las Vegas about the company’s games business.
Amazon Games also took Smilegate’s Lost Ark game, which had been published in Asia, and released it in the West. That went well, and then it started picking up other titles that were published in Asia and needed a partner to bring them to the West.
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Amazon Games teamed up with Bandai Namco to bring the Blue Protocol MMO to the West. And Amazon Games announced this month it would team up with South Korea’s NCSoft and publish the MMO Throne & Liberty in the West. Anderson said these titles are taking some of the pressure off of Amazon Games’ internal studios, which are still working on
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