Report says Amazon has canceled its Lord of the Rings MMO again

Amazon has reportedly canceled the Lord of the Rings MMO that was in development at Amazon Games Orange County, the studio behind New World. The report comes from Eurogamer, which says the project was scrapped not long after layoffs hit Amazon’s games division last October.

Amazon hasn’t directly confirmed the cancellation. Jeff Gattis, the company’s head of games, told Eurogamer that Amazon is still exploring a new game set in Tolkien’s world, but stopped short of saying whether the MMO itself is still alive.

This would be the second time an Amazon-backed Lord of the Rings MMO has fallen apart. The company first announced one in 2019 with Leyou, but that version was canceled after Tencent acquired Leyou. Amazon then signed a new deal with Embracer in 2023 to make another MMO based on the franchise.

According to the report, the Orange County team had already started shifting developers off New World and onto the Lord of the Rings project before the layoffs. Sources said around 1,000 developers were in the process of moving over, and the game was entering pre-production when the cuts happened.

There’s also some disagreement over why those layoffs happened. An internal memo reportedly said Amazon was pulling back from a significant amount of first-party development, especially MMO work. Separate reporting claimed an internal push around AI played a role, though Gattis denied that and said the cuts were part of a broader business shift.

For now, the clearest takeaway is that Amazon’s latest Lord of the Rings MMO appears to be off the table, even if the company still wants to make something in that universe. If that changes, Amazon hasn’t said what form the project would take.