I’ll be honest, I am quite surprised they had 180 workers left there after the continuous stream of tepid stuff they’ve put out over time.
Still, sucks for the people working there, becuase I bet a lot of them at least started really driven and motivated before corporate ground their will down.
Another example of under funded giant corporate projects and then shocked Pikachu that they aren’t wildly profitable. They’ll never understand you can make a wildly profitable game, but it requires investment
Or just y’know: provide a service, make a profit, provide people with stable jobs, keep on going. I know it sounds crazy, but you don’t have to have all the money…
It does require some actual inspiration as well. Companies are setting up production lines and wondering why solid gold doesn’t just plop out the end when they switch it on.
It is an honest shame, there was a lot of talent brought in, but honestly not surprised it ended this way.
Talent that was wasted and discarded.
Is this your first experience with corporate america?
No, it was just especially egregious with Amazon in this scenario (and often in general with them …)
They had some promising technology and talent, but focused on what creativity they could cram into the flywheel instead of coming up with something good that could then later feed back into the ecosystem. The latter process can yield surprise successes like the Amazon Echo.
Amazon has a games division?
For only $20, the new Amazon Basics Grand Theft Auto.
I would play that.
Had. Briefly.
I’m not understanding. As this is the first I’ve ever heard of this, I went to their site and it looks like freebies for games you play and games from other developers.
Did Amazon make their own games? If not, what were these 180 workers doing exactly?
They made New World and were supposedly working on a LOTR MMO.
Didn’t New Worlds turn into a ghost town month after launch?
Yeah it cratered pretty hard, but they have been adding content to the game. Launch was a buggy clusterfuck.
Not entirely well versed in the New World Saga but from what I’ve heard and read here’s roughly what happened:
- The dev team was developing a hardcore always-on PvP MMO, which is fine but not for everyone
- Playtest rolls around and the devs get back player numbers you would expect for a hardcore PvP MMO
- Speculation: the higher ups really don’t like the projected return on their investment given the abysmal (for their ideas) player numbers and force the Studio to pivot to PvE content
- At this point the entire game has been designed around PvP and the devs now have only ~1 year to somehow shove PvE content in there
- Launch comes and since the devs had to spend all available time on forcing in PvE content what is present is buggy and doesn’t fit the game mechanics
- Ensue several months of panicked back and forth patching of the game by the devs, making the entire mess worse because everyone is pissed by one change or another
To be fair, a lot of the game breaking launch bugs that hurt the game for me were with PVP (specifically, the instanced wars). I do know there were others but those PVP bugs are what I’ll always remember. The lag, the broken healing, the hatchet exploit, and a few others.
I bought new world, never actually played it, I had tried the beta and said well this seems cool and got it then never played it at launch
Might wanna get to it eventually before Amazon shuts it down
Cuz it was killing gpus
The article has the answers.
That didn’t last long
