Bloomberg Report Reveals Major Outage At Amazon Game Studios

You may know it as the Everything Store. But there is a chunk of “everything” that Amazon hasn’t been able to crack: video games. A new report from BloombergJason Schreier and Priya Anand show why Amazon Game Studios, backed by one of the largest companies in the world, can’t seem to make a successful video game.

The details, based on interviews with more than 30 current and former Amazon employees, paint a clear picture we know all too well. An outside company is throwing money into an ambitious project. Supervisors refuse to listen to ordinary staff. Senior people implement draconian policies that hinder rather than support the workflow. You would think these companies would have the memo by now.

Today alleged story from Amazon, in particular, is like a big case of Bad Video Game Development Yahtzee:

• First designs for the game New world– in which you play as a settler in a fictionalized 17th-century America – featured enemy designs that bore an uncomfortable resemblance to Native Americans. Per Bloomberg, Amazon hired a tribal adviser who found the image was indeed offensive. ‘ New world, which was initially slated for release in August 2020, is now scheduled for release in the spring of 2021.
• Developers at Amazon Game Studios were forced to use its own development tool called Lumberyard. (You may have read about this in a piece equally excellent reporting by Wiredlast October’s Cecilia D’Anastasio.) In 2018, Amazon brought in Christoph Hartmann, a Take-Two veteran, as vice president of game studios. He relaxed the “mandate” that forced everyone to use Lumberyard.
• “Bro Culture” is reportedly ubiquitous in Amazon’s game development studios. A woman told Bloomberg that, after a disagreement with a male senior leadership member, he took a number of new positions over her and hired men in those positions.
• Amazon has built in legendary developers who have worked on popular series such as Portal and Far Cry. Only one of them remains.
• The leader of the entire games division, Mike Frazzini, had never made a video game. He reportedly frustrated developers with basic footage and struggled to distinguish between gameplay and concept footage.
• Rather than designing new concepts, Amazon tried to develop other popular games. Called a project Nova, Inspired by League of Legends, was canceled in 2017. One called Intensity, fueled by Fortnites dizzying success, was thrown out in 2019. And then there is the fateful one, Overwatch-Like it Melting pot, which are planted so hard with the face it was released and then released again last year.
• Amazon Luna, the company’s quest for the hot games-on-demand space, doesn’t even fall into the gaming division. It’s run by David Limp, who heads Amazon’s device division (responsible for physical products like the Kindle and the Echo).

If you crave a different story of persistent deception and misguided decision-making in the video game industry, Bloomberga look behind the scenes at Amazon Game Studios is worth reading.