Amazon’s Lord of the Rings MMO open beta will start no later than January 1, 2023

Amazon plans to launch an open beta for the PC version of the Lord of the Rings mmo that the company is working on by January 1, 2023. A first prototype of the mmo should be ready in the summer of 2021.

The rough outline of the planning for the upcoming Lord of the Rings mmo development has come online as part of publications related to the recent acquisition of the Leyou company by Tencent. Leyou is the parent company of Athlon Games, which is developing the Lord of the Rings mmo for Amazon.

That game will become an official Lord of the Rings title: Athlon will pay more than $ 8 million in licensing fees to Middle-earth Enterprises, which owns the rights to The Hobbit and Lord of the Rings. The license agreement mentions January 11, 2021 as the date to have a set-up for the lore for the game ready. A first prototype must then be operational by June.

The agreement is also that a closed beta will take place on or before September 2022, followed by an open beta before January 1, 2023. The versions for the Xbox One and PS4 will follow twelve months after the start of the open beta for PC. The mention of those consoles already shows that it concerns an older schedule: the agreement dates from June 2019. There is a chance that this schedule has now been adjusted due to the corona crisis. Amazon announced last year that it was developing the free-to-play mmo with Athlon Games.