Amazon’s gaming divisions have laid off almost 100 employees, with the San Diego development studio, Prime Gaming, and Game Growth divisions among the most affected.
According to a memo from Christoph Hartmann, Vice President of Amazon Games, the company will continue investing in internal development efforts while growing teams as their projects progress.
The remaining employees at Amazon’s San Diego studio will focus on pre-production of an undisclosed project while the Montreal-based development studio, currently working on another undisclosed project, will expand.
Amazon’s MMO New World, their only internally developed title, will continue to be developed, with the team behind the game in Irvine, California, also growing. Amazon has announced that New World will follow a seasonal content model, with the first season launched on the same day as this announcement.
Despite these layoffs, Amazon Games will still publish MMOs, including the popular free-to-play game Lost Ark. Amazon Games also announced that it would release NCSoft’s Throne and Liberty and Bandai Namco’s Blue Protocol in the West, with the releases scheduled for the first and second halves of 2023, respectively.
The layoffs come as part of Amazon’s broader round of mass layoffs that began in March and affected around 9,000 employees. Of those, approximately 400 were from Twitch, which Amazon acquired in 2014.