According to a former employee who was let go during the mass layoffs at Amazon Games earlier this week, a second Lord of the Rings MMO has now been cancelled.
"This morning I was part of the layoffs at Amazon Games, alongside my incredibly talented peers on New World and our fledgling Lord of the Rings game (y'all would have loved it)," former senior gameplay engineer Ashleigh Amrine wrote on LinkedIn in a now hidden post, as reported by Rock Paper Shotgun.
In 2019, Amazon announced its first The Lord of the Rings MMO in partnership with Leyou, but it was shuttered in 2021 after Leyou were acquired by Tencent. Two years later, in 2023, Amazon announced yet another partnership with the franchise's new rights holder, Embracer, for a second Lord of the Rings game, describing it as a "persistent open-world MMO adventure".
This MMO would have encompassed The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings trilogy of novels.
Amazon has not publicly announced the game's cancellation, as it did with New World, but Amrine's post suggests that the project has at least been put on ice, with developers let go. We have reached out for comment and will...
