September 30, 2016 was a big day for Amazon Game Studios: It was on that day, at TwitchCon, it unveiled , , and , signalling a major push into the realm of big-budget game development. Not quite a decade later, we find ourselves standing amidst the rubble of that once-great [[link]] ambition, with a single question on our minds: What the hell went wrong?
Because things very definitely did go wrong. First, Amazon in 2018 after some iffy previews and an open alpha that failed to impress. It followed that up by not halting development of Crucible, even though it probably should have given that Crucible ended up being and was ultimately .
Various other whiffs have been interspersed throughout—failed games, forgotten game stores, that sort of thing—but for me, the fates of those three games really encapsulate Amazon's gaming misadventure: Big talk, half-assed execution, ugly endings, all of it leading to yesterday's announcement of .
Of course there's no single answer [[link]] to the question of what the hell went wrong, because obviously a lot of things did. But the end of New World, and seemingly of Amazon's gaming ambitions as a whole, bring to mind what former Prime Gaming vice president Ethan Evans had to say about it earlier this year—essentially, that hubris and money are a dangerous combination.
"At Amazon, we assumed that size and visibility would be enough to attract customers, but we underestimated the power of existing user habits," Evans admitted in his February . "We never validated our core assumptions before investing heavily in solutions. The truth is that gamers already had the solution to their problems, and they weren't going to switch platforms just because a new one was available.
"We needed to build something dramatically better, but we failed to do so. And we needed to validate our assumptions about our customers before starting to build. But we never really did that either. Just because you are big enough to build something doesn't mean people will use it."
The extent of Amazon's failure to crack the Steam nut is revealed in the fact that not only did it fail to compete, but lots of people didn't even know it was trying in the first place. That's, uhh, really not a good sign.
Today I learned amazon had a
— @3mbg.bsky.social ()platform competing against Steam. lol
Amazon: "you took everything from me" Steam:
— @bearpigman.bsky.social ()
Amazon was OFFICIALLY competing against Steam this whole time?
— @sliwinski.bsky.social ()
I’ve had steam since it was a thing, and this is quite literally the first time I’ve heard they [[link]] have a game store Like I knew about New World or whatever their MMORPG was but that’s it.
— @richs.bsky.social ()
Amazon isn't giving up on games entirely, but it's shifting focus away from major productions like New World to stuff like the . I'm sure that'll work out much better.
