Amazon halts development of LOTR mmorpg after failed negotiations with Tencent

Amazon Game Studios is suspending development of the Lord of the Rings mmorpg. According to Bloomberg, this would be due to difficult negotiations with the Chinese company Tencent, which acquired the parent company of the responsible game studio, Athlon Games, at the end of December.

For this planned mmorpg, Amazon Game Studios collaborated with the Chinese Leyou Technologies, the parent company of game studio Athlon Games that helped develop the game. Leyou Technologies was acquired last December by the Chinese Tencent, which, according to Bloomberg sources, pulled the plug after difficult negotiations.

According to an Amazon spokesperson, the companies failed to reach an agreement that forced them to stop developing the game. “We are therefore disappointed that we will not be getting the game in stores,” an Amazon spokesperson told The Verge.

Plans for a Lord of the Rings MMO were first announced in 2018 by Athlon Studios. In 2019, Amazon Game Studios announced that it would partner with Athlon Games to offer this mmorpg as a free-to-play game on both PC and consoles. At the end of last year, it was announced that Amazon Game Studios wanted to have a first prototype of the mmorpg ready by the summer of 2021, as well as an open beta for the PC version of the game by early 2023. Those plans seem to have been stopped for the time being.

This is not the first time that Amazon Game Studios has stopped developing game titles. For example, in 2018 the studio stopped developing the multiplayer game Breakaway. In October of last year, it also pulled the plug on development on the third-person shooter, Crucible, after the game was still in beta for several weeks during the spring of 2020. The long-awaited mmorpg New Worlds was postponed for a third time to August 31, 2021 at the beginning of this year.